Q4 2024 Opportunity Zone Report
Home Values Continue to Ride Coattails of National Gains
by ATTOM Staff
ATTOM, a leading curator of land, property data, and real estate analytics, released its fourth-quarter 2024 report analyzing qualified low-income Opportunity Zones targeted by Congress for economic redevelopment in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. In this report, ATTOM looked at 3,783 zones around the United States with sufficient data to analyze, meaning they had at least five home sales in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The report found that median single-family home and condo prices increased from the third quarter of 2024 to the fourth quarter of 2024 in 49% of Opportunity Zones around the country with enough data to measure. They were up annually in 61% of those zones.
As the nation’s 13-year housing market boom continued, median prices again grew more than 10% annually in almost half the Opportunity Zones analyzed.
Those trends, in and around low-income neighborhoods where the federal government offers tax breaks to spur economic revival, extended a long-term pattern of home values inside Opportunity Zones closely tracking broader nationwide price shifts for at least the last three years. That scenario has held regardless of whether the housing market has seen limited, moderate or robust gains.
Despite overall upswings inside Opportunity Zone markets, the fourth-quarter trends again were mixed, with typical values rising more in higher-priced zones than in the very lowest-priced neighborhoods. That continued to reveal how the very bottom of the U.S. housing market is benefitting less from the national run of price increases, and could be more vulnerable if the broader market surge levels off or reverses.
Nevertheless, the latest patterns mark yet another sign that some of the most distressed communities in the nation are showing economic strength, or limited weakness, compared to other markets around the country.
Moreover, by several important measures, Opportunity Zones enjoyed even more progress than the nation as a whole during the fourth quarter of 2024. For example, median price increases bested typical nationwide gains in a slightly larger portion of Opportunity Zones than elsewhere.
“Micro-markets inside Opportunity Zones continue to reap remarkably consistent benefits from the home-price boom that is still reaching far and wide across the country. Again and again, we are seeing notable levels of economic potential in these areas that have long been in need of revival,” said Rob Barber, CEO for ATTOM. “This keeps happening as rising values and tight supplies of homes for sale push many buyers on limited budgets into areas they may not have considered a few years ago.”
He added that “Opportunity Zone price trends are far from consistent, with the lowest-end areas struggling to keep up. That’s a warning sign for those neighborhoods. But the big takeaway from the latest data is that significant money is flowing into these locations, which can provide a stepping stone for the investment that the Opportunity Zone legislation is intended to spur.”
Amid economic limitations, typical home values across wide swaths of Opportunity Zones remained far below those around most of the nation in the waning months of 2024. Median fourth-quarter prices inside about 80% of the zones stood below the U.S. median of $360,000. That was about the same portion as in earlier periods over the past three years. In addition, median prices were still less than $200,000 in almost half the zones.
Considerable price volatility also continued inside Opportunity Zones, with median values either dropping or increasing by at least 5% in nearly three-quarters of those locations from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year. That again likely reflected small numbers of sales in many zones.
Still, when taken as a whole, the latest overall trends in Opportunity Zones generally matched the nationwide path of prices, which went up 1% quarterly and 9% annually during the last few months of 2024.
