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The Silverlake townhome looks like it faces the Lakeharbor shopping center with nothing between it but the parking lot. Would that affect its value that much?
Most of the Boise area doesn't have a very good walkscore. With lots of free parking and not much traffic (for the most part) it is hard to get people to quit driving to the local convenience store even. Boise is pretty bike friendly though and getting better.
One of the most walk able areas is Boise's north end but those are typically older homes lacking the garage space you are after because in 1900-1950 people didn't need a 2 or 3 car garage, they seldom had one.
The Bown Crossing area in east Boise is pretty nice but fairly expensive. Anything along the Boise Greenbelt typically isn't too far from restaurants and shops.
In Meridian, anything near Fairview to the Railroad tracks to the south along Eagle or Meridian Road is pretty walkable.
In Garden City, the newer waterfront district is trying to come into it's own.
There are lots of areas that are little micro markets that might work so I suggest pulling up homes that meet your criteria and them pulling them up in a mapping program like Google Maps (Google Earth) to see how far it is from things you might enjoy.
As far as being accepted here, for the most part you should be but there are always idiots living around us with their own biases. In my senior year at BSU in 1985, I worked for the Idaho Business Development Center, as a Marketing Intern and remember the statistic that our demographic was 99.5% Caucasian. Boise is now closer to 90%.
As you can see from other posts in this forum there are lots of people moving into the Boise area so we are now much more of a cultural stew than we used to be.
Lacerta, thanks. You've made the best argument for NOT Boise. We thought the Boise market might be hotter than the current national average of 4.7%. Apparently not. Again, we don't have to move. But, I do wonder what makes the housing market in Boise, a seemingly great place to live, so soft. Our current home has risen around 30% in 3 years and our daughter's 50%. Granted, we live in a great place, but our daughter lives in a sleepy town outside of Milwaukee.
Lacerta, thanks. You've made the best argument for NOT Boise. We thought the Boise market might be hotter than the current national average of 4.7%. Apparently not. Again, we don't have to move. But, I do wonder what makes the housing market in Boise, a seemingly great place to live, so soft. Our current home has risen around 30% in 3 years and our daughter's 50%. Granted, we live in a great place, but our daughter lives in a sleepy town outside of Milwaukee.
Our area has been ahead of the market trend for the last 15 years, from what I've seen. We rose earlier, crashed earlier, and then started to recover much earlier. Several articles I read listed us as one of the fastest recovering cities in the country. So we've already had huge increases. It is possible we will still increase another 10% in the next 3 years, but we are in the middle of a HUGE boom this spring, so you have already missed the lower prices. My house is worth around 80% more than it was 3-4 years ago.
I actually heard my broker tell someone this morning that it is a terrible time to be a buyer in Boise this month. We have a client who has made offers on 7 houses so far, at or above full price, 2 of which had escalation clauses, and got beat out on every one of them.
In my opinion, and from what I've seen, I think a lot of people have waited to put their houses on the market, so the inventory has been REALLY low, which drove up the prices. Now a lot of people are finally able to afford to sell again. I personally know more than a dozen people who are listing their homes in the next 30 days. So my personal prediction is that we will have a lot of houses come on the market, causing prices to flatten out in the next 12-18 months. I think most of the rest of the country will follow suit in the next few years.
But I don't have a crystal ball. This crazy run up could continue. Boise is a beautiful place to live, we make "top places to raise a family/retire/whatever" lists almost every year. So there is always a large influx of people wanting to move here. Demand could continue to outpace supply for the next 10 years, continuing to drive up the prices. If it was going to happen anywhere in the country, this could be the place.
Thanks again, Lacerta. I appreciate the intelligence of your response. It gives us lots to consider. Now may, indeed be the time to rent...or just stay put for a few more years. Of course, we are considering other cities, but you make great points to think about whatever we do. We believe that, although the market is still strong where we currently live, our place is already artificially high based on what else is out there. I have never believed that your house should be used as a short term investment, yet we find ourselves in this current market and thinking (perhaps a bit impetuously) about the possibilities. You also have very nicely detailed the area for us.
The Silverlake townhome looks like it faces the Lakeharbor shopping center with nothing between it but the parking lot. Would that affect its value that much?
Not quite the neighborhood-y (is that a word?) we were going for! 😛
Another thing: I know that Boise has lots of sunny days. But, I've never been to Boise when the sun was shining. Perhaps my experience it atypical. Are there blue-sky days or it is more partly cloudy with glimpse of the sun every once in a while?
I just noticed that no one answered your question about the sunshine. We have a lot of brilliantly blue sky days, with nary a cloud in sight. But wintertime, we can have an inversion, where a layer of cloud cover can hang around for days or even weeks. But we have an average of over 200 sunny days a year, and a very large portion of those are beautiful blue sky days.
Lacerta, slightly off topic, but in your experience do you think the Boise area "crashed earlier" than other places during the Recession?
My observer / non-professional opinion was that we seemed to crash almost a year to year and a half after a lot of other places (like, early 2008). Not sure the data would support my contention or not.
I just noticed that no one answered your question about the sunshine. We have a lot of brilliantly blue sky days, with nary a cloud in sight. But wintertime, we can have an inversion, where a layer of cloud cover can hang around for days or even weeks. But we have an average of over 200 sunny days a year, and a very large portion of those are beautiful blue sky days.
Lacerta, slightly off topic, but in your experience do you think the Boise area "crashed earlier" than other places during the Recession?
My observer / non-professional opinion was that we seemed to crash almost a year to year and a half after a lot of other places (like, early 2008). Not sure the data would support my contention or not.
Well, my office, which is a pretty small real estate/property management/new construction office, usually does about 150 transactions a year. We started ramping up in 2004. In 2005, we did 408 (that year was a madhouse for us). In 2006, that dropped to 209, which was still very busy, but we stopped building quite as much, and so didn't have all the lot options that were a big part of the 408 from the prior year. 2007 was only 94, and every year since 2007 has been fewer than 100 until 2015 (this year we've already had 42, so it is shaping up to be better than last year so far, which was better than 2014). That would indicate to me that the crash happened sometime mid 2007.
We were also building a lot of houses at the time leading up to the crash. We actually were getting a little nervous and had stopped building very many specs, focusing mostly on presolds. So we ended up with only 3 specs in the ground, which we finished and kept as rentals. I just looked at those records. One was finished in Summer 2007, one was finished in Fall 2007, and the other was finished in Winter 2007. So the new construction market crashed sometime probably late Summer 2007 according to that, since all our specs before that sold.
Looking at MLS, home prices in general in Ada County peaked in July 2006, but stayed pretty close to peak until they peaked again in August, 2007, after which they really dropped.
You know, in my prior post, I almost said we had an earlier rise, crashed about the same time, but then had a faster recovery, instead of saying we crashed earlier. I should have gone with that, because a timeline online says that the housing market started its crash in August, 2007. So we were right at the forefront of the crash, but not really ahead of it. So excellent question.
Interestingly, we are still slightly below peak prices, because our peak was so bubbly high. Unrealistically high. So while some parts of the country are up to 40% over peak prices, we are still not quite back to peak (about 5% off). So maybe we could still go further up this year and over the next few. I'm just not feeling it.
But no one should base their life decisions based on one person's opinion, unless that one person is themselves or their spouse. I'm just voicing my opinion, and it is no more or less valid than anyone else's. So I hope the OP doesn't decide whether or not to move to Boise based solely on this thread.
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