Through August, sales of single-family homes and condos were at an eight-year high nationwide with a growing share of buyers using FHA loans to purchase. RealtyTrac looked at the markets with at least 10,000 single-family home and condo sales through the first eight months of the year to see which are seeing the biggest increase in home sales from a year ago, which indicated regular buyers are back in force.
All top five markets are millennial hot spots that have the type of amenities that appeal to millennials — not to mention jobs for those millennials — but without as high of a price tag that comes with traditional millennial meccas such as San Francisco and New York. Although certainly prices are rising quickly in many of these markets.
We also looked at the markets with the biggest decrease in home sales from a year ago, and not too surprisingly, these are all in the Rust Belt, which continues to experience a population drain.
Daren Blomquist is the vice president of RealtyTrac.
