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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.

Data: See The Change In Ada County Property Values

chart, home values
Data: Ada County Assessor | Chart: Adam Cotterell

Property values in Idaho's most-populated county went up between 2013 and 2014 in a big way. This is the second year in a row Ada County's property values increased. Of course those increases are on the heels of four-straight years of decline after the housing bubble burst.  

This chart shows the year-over-year changes in Ada County property values. It clearly shows the boom and the bust.

Despite the year-to-year shifts, the average Ada County home is now worth about the same as it was in 2006. This year’s average value is $211,186 up from $185,136 in 2013. That’s a 14 percent increase. If you use median home values instead, you get a 15 percent increase.

But Ada County assessor Bob McQuade thinks the number most relevant for homeowners is 18 percent. That’s the average change in home values.

Of the more than 130,000 “improved properties” (homes) in the county, about 127,000 went up in value. Some increased a little, some a lot. Take all those increases and add in the 2,000 or so homes that lost value, and the handful that didn’t change, and you get an average increase of 18 percent.

Using the same method, you see average increases of 25 percent before the bubble burst. McQuade says those numbers highlight just how abnormal these changes are. McQuade is not saying Ada County is heading for another housing bubble now, but he says big increases like this year and last are not sustainable long term, and can be warning signs of a bubble.

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