Economy

Your Guide To Idaho's Housing Boom & Bust

00000176-d8fc-dce8-adff-faff71570000The Boise-metro market was hardest hit in Idaho's housing crisis, with foreclosures concentrated in Ada and Canyon Counties.Idaho’s housing boom was centered around its two main metropolitan areas, Boise and Coeur d’Alene.John Starr of the global real estate company Colliers International had a front-row seat as capital poured into the local housing markets in the years preceding the bust.When he thinks of the early 2000s, he remembers watching land prices rise with demand, and house lots shrink. What the area wound up with, he says, were more and more subdivisions, packed tight with houses.Census data show that the state’s population grew by more than 28 percent from 1990 to 2000, and by more than 20 percent from 2000 to 2010. Starr said that's due in large part to growth at Micron Technology. That growth, in turn, fueled Idaho's housing boom.“The reason we were doubling the national average growth rate was we were moving in a whole bunch of people that we couldn’t produce here in Idaho, namely electrical engineers and so forth to work at Micron. The data points that people were looking at that were helping them make decisions about coming to Boise and deploying capital and building and helping us grow – those data points were skewed.” - John Starr, Colliers InternationalAccording to Metrostudy, a housing and data information company, Boise’s housing market began to bottom out in 2009.

Post-Recession Home Values Held Firm In Small Northwest Counties

NWNews | By Jessica Robinson,

Jessica Robinson

Published November 14, 2013 at 6:06 PM MST

Across the nation, home values plummeted after the U.S. housing bubble burst in 2008. But that was not the case in some of the less populous counties in the Northwest.

Many urban areas – including Seattle, Portland and Boise – saw home values drop by tens of thousands of dollars after the recession. But drive a few hours outside of the city, and you reach a place like Minidoka County, Idaho. A new Census Bureau analysis reveals there was no significant hit on property values here -- nor in most counties with a population of 20-65,000.

But that doesn't mean the area had a booming housing market.

“When they're talking stable, it means it's not dropping any more but it's also not rising very fast," says Rupert, Idaho Sheryl Koyle. "So it's just kind of status quo, if that makes sense.”

There were exceptions to the small-county rule. The median property value in Crook County, Ore., near once fast-growing Bend, took a bigger hit than King County, Wash. in terms of dollars.

But experts say most smaller counties never experienced the huge rise in housing prices in the first places -- and therefore, avoided the big drop.

Post-Recession Home Values Held Firm In Small Northwest Counties

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