Financial technology company SmartAsset released the rankings from its third annual Healthiest Housing markets Study — and Edgewood ranked as the top housing market in the country.
The study measures market health by the average numbers of years residents spend in homes, home values, ease of sale, and the costs associated with ownership.
Check out this table:
A healthy housing market is both stable and affordable; homeowners in a healthy market should be able to easily sell their homes, with a low risk of losing money over the long run. So, in order to find the healthiest housing markets in the country, SmartAsset considered the following four factors: stability, affordability, fluidity and risk of loss.
SmartAsset measured stability with two equally weighted indicators: the number of years people remain in their homes and the percentage of homeowners with negative equity (as homeowners with negative equity are more likely to go into foreclosure). To account for our second factor, risk, we used the percentage of homes that decreased in value. To determine housing market fluidity, we looked at data on the average time a for-sale home in each area spends on the market — the longer it takes to sell, the less fluid the market. Finally, we calculated affordability as the monthly cost of owning a home as a percentage of household income in each county and city.
Affordability accounted for 40% of the housing health index, while each of the other three factors accounted for 20%.
When data on the above four factors was unavailable for cities, SmartAsset excluded these from final rankings of healthiest markets.
