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High Marks for Housing Affordability

By David Robinson

June 16, 2011, 8:28 AM

If you're in the market for an affordable home, the Buffalo Niagara region isn't a bad place to look around.

Two new surveys give the region high marks for housing affordability, largely reflecting the relatively low home prices here and mortgage rates that are near 40-year lows, which make houses here within the financial reach of a wide swath of potential homebuyers.

In the broadest, and most comprehensive of the reports, the Buffalo Niagara region ranked 36th among the nation's 100 largest housing markets for affordability, according to researchers at Harvard University.

That study, the annual State of the Nation's Housing report released last week by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, ranked housing markets based on the relationship between home prices and household income.

In the Buffalo Niagara region, the median home last year sold at a price that was 2.74 times the area's median household income.

That means housing here is a much more manageable financial burden than it is across the country, where the typical home sells for 3.4 times the median household income even after the collapse in home prices nationally over the last three years.

"We're a great place to live at a reasonable price," said Sam Talarico, the owner of Coldwell Banker Talarico in Lewiston. "If you're in Western New York and you're in real estate, you know we're affordable."

But the Harvard study also showed that affordability in the Buffalo Niagara region has been slowly eroding since 1995 as home prices here have gradually increased and the area's housing market avoided the boom-and-bust cycle that hit many other parts of the country.

According to the Harvard study, homes here were less affordable during the second half of 2010 than at any time locally in the previous 15 years. The median price of homes sold during the first four months of this year rose 2 percent over the last year to $111,500, according to the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors. That's up about 23 percent since 2005.

A second, more narrow, survey released Wednesday by Coldwell Banker Real Estate ranked Niagara Falls as the most affordable market in the country for homebuyers looking for a four-bedroom, two-bath home.

Buffalo and Cheektowaga also fared well in the rankings, with Buffalo finishing 42nd and Cheektowaga 67th among the more than 2,300 local housing markets included in the survey. Tonawanda ranked seventh in the state and 173rd nationally.

The results, which are based on the average listing price of properties listed through Coldwell Banker between September 2010 and March, reflect the Buffalo Niagara region's relatively low housing prices.

The average listing price of the four-bedroom, two-bath homes in Niagara Falls during the period covered by the survey was the lowest in the nation at just over $60,000.

"I guess it's good and bad. The good part is we're affordable," Talarico said.

drobinson@buffnews.comnull