By DON FENLEY

Despite a skimpy inventory and the fastest mortgage rate hike cycle in decades, the Tri-Cities regional housing market has proven itself a lot more resilient than during previous cycles. And as sales retreat to a pre-pandemic level, two local counties are rated among the least likely in the nation to see a market downturn. It’s not unrealistic to apply that stability to those counties’ neighbors who were not part of the analysis.

Some of that market resilience is the result of the better buffering homeowners have from fluctuating mortgage rates.

Unlike homeowners in Canada and the United Kingdom, U.S. owners with fixed rate-rate mortgages are not burdened by payments adjustments ever time there’s a change. Almost all (96%) of U.S. mortgage debt is with a fixed rate – and nationwide 38.5% of owners are mortgage free.

The Tri-Cities region is way ahead of the game in that department.

Census data show that homeowners in all but two local counties don’t have a mortgage. Here’s how that looks by county and the percentage of owners with no mortgage:

• Carter, 57.1%
• Greene, 50.4%
• Hancock, 71.6%
• Hawkins, 51%
• Johnson, 61.2%
• Sullivan, 41.9%
• Unicoi, 57.1%
• Washington, 44.1%

The least venerable to a market decline comes in ATTOM’s first-quarter Special Housing Risk Report. ATTOM, a leading curator of real estate data, analyzed data from 590 counties in the report.

The analysis included residential foreclosure data, home affordability, and underwater property reports, plus March 2024 unemployment figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Counties with sufficient data to analyze were ranked based on the first-quarter percentage of residential properties with a foreclosure filing, the percentage of average local wages needed to afford the major expenses of owning a median-priced home and the percentage of properties with outstanding mortgage balances that exceeded their estimated market values, along with March 2024 county-level unemployment rates. Ranks then were added up to develop a composite ranking across all four categories. Equal weight was given to each category.

Counties with the lowest composite rank were considered most vulnerable to housing market problems. Those with the highest composite rank were considered least vulnerable.

Sullivan and Washington were the only Tri-Cities region counties that met the benchmark to include in the analysis. Both have consistently ranked among the least vulnerable in the state and nation to a downturn.

Sullivan is ranked the second among the 14 state counties least likely to see a downturn. It and Washington were also noted among the most affordable markets based on the percentage of income needed to buy a median priced home.

Here’s how the 14 state counties’ vulnerability was ranked, and the percentage of income needed to buy.

• Davidson – 588, 35.1%
• Sullivan – 584, 21.7%
• Knox – 583, 33.8%
• Blount – 581, 37.8%
• Rutherford – 568, 41.5%
• Williamson – 562, 58.5%
• Washington – 539, 30.5%
• Summer – 532, 45%
• Hamilton – 519, 32.1%
• Wilson – 488, 52.5%
• Bradley – 480, 29.7%
• Maury – 434, 42.6%
• Montgomery – 332, 38.2%
• Shelby – 250, 17.3%

Categories: REAL ESTATE