A billiard room, a terrace with a barbecue, a swimming pool and a room for cleaning bicycles and dogs: Luke Evans proudly leads the tour of the common areas of the building of thirty apartments just delivered by his family business. From the balcony, he observes the mountains and, above all, the wasteland, where shops and restaurants will soon flourish. In the background, the school is already under construction, while the wooded river is bordered by a cycle path.
Boise, capital of Idaho, is booming, and this valley, which once served as a ranch, is turning into a residential area. The city of 235,000 inhabitants is one of those friendly, affordable small towns where life is good, which always appeared at the top of the rankings, but where people did not really move in.
Then came the crisis linked to Covid-19, which created a click: sometimes nicknamed “Zoomville” (in reference to the Zoom videoconferencing application, widely used for teleworking), Boise welcomed migrants from the Pacific coast. : Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay, where the rules of confinement were considered unbearable.
This raised real estate fever, with an explosion in demand, as in all those small towns in America unknown to Europeans, which saw an influx of urban dwellers from the coasts, Florida, Texas, Arizona or North Carolina. . In Ada County, which includes Boise, the price of a home has jumped nearly 60%, from $375,000 (about 383,000 euros) in April 2020 to $590,000 in July 2022.
In the United States as a whole, the surge was 45%. Luke Evans shows one of the fully equipped apartments: 549,000 dollars for 93 square meters. Well-made accommodation, but at more than 6,000 euros per square meter in a small town at the gates of the desert, at the foot of the Rockies.
The storm threatens
The ace ! The party is over. Half of Luke Evans’ apartments, which have been on sale since June, have not yet left. This summer, transactions in Ada County were down more than 20%, as they were across the country. Gone are the days when a house sold out in three hours, with overbids of $100,000.
The family business has stepped on the brakes: in 2022, instead of delivering one house per week as it did before the pandemic, it will only deliver two per month. “In 2023, we plan to continue at this pace”confie M. Evans.
In the city, the signs for sale are still few, but the storm threatens. “The stock has increased by 150% in one year, we are approaching three months”says real estate agent Sheila Smith. “Prices have fallen back below $500,000”, she assures. Across the United States, since June, the decline has been confirmed: the median value of a house has lost 6% in two months, falling from 414,000 dollars to 390,000 dollars, according to the National Association of Realtors (l association of real estate agencies).
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