Johnson City tagged as best Tenn. city for new home buyers

Johnson City scored some social media branding points this week. It was selected as Tennessee’s best city for new home buyers in a bit of creative number-crunching by Insurify.

Insurify is an insurance quotes comparison web site. Its research team analyzed both proprietary and public data for its best cities selection. They rated U.S. cities based on a composite score of factors including real estate demand, employment levels, public school enrollment, and driver and pedestrian safety.

According to the firm’s press release on the study, its “research team turned to realtor.com for statistics on real estate popularity and home value growth across U.S. cities. Cities with hotter real estate markets and positively trending home values received a higher score. Public school enrollment statistics and the unemployment rate in each city, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey, were the defining variables in education and employment levels, respectively. A higher score was assigned to cities with higher public-school enrollment and low unemployment rates.”

They also referred to their database of over 2.9 million car insurance applications to calculate citywide measures of driver and pedestrian safety. Cities were evaluated for rates of at-fault accidents, DUIs, speeding tickets, and failure to yield to pedestrian violations.  The safer a city’s road patterns, or the lower the citywide rates of these four violations, the higher a score they received.

Existing home sales in Johnson City were up 4.4% in 2020, according to the Northeast Tennessee Association of Realtors (NETAR) Home Sales Report. The average sales price was $223,874, an 11.9% increase from the 2019 annual average.