Home Prices: How's Your Town Doing?
[Home values keep climbing across the U.S. But we looked at 500 neighborhoods -- and found slowdowns in some surprising spots. June Fletcher tours the towns to watch.]</br></br>THEY'RE UP 16% in a Washington, D.C., suburb, but losing steam in Denver. And just outside Los Angeles, home prices in the hillside town of La Canada Flintridge have shot up more than 23% from a year earlier. "We've been discovered," says Michael Braverman, who expects to get $500,000 more for his home than he paid five years ago.</br></br>Forget watching the stock market. The best -- and maybe the only -- game in town these days is the remarkably resilient real-estate market. Last year alone, amid all the bad news, home prices still rose by 7% nationally -- and some economists believe things will be almost as strong this year. And yet, many homeowners are holding their breath, worrying about the "bubble" and asking: What about my town?</br></br>We've got some answers. In an exhaustive town-by-town survey, we looked at home prices in more than 500 upscale ZIP Codes, taking a snapshot of prices last year and comparing them with the year before. We found that nobody in Greenwich, Conn., or Southern California is losing sleep. But who'd have thought duplex-lined Beach Haven, N.J., would be in the top 10 nationally for growth -- or that so many other overlooked communities would be so strong (introducing . . . Mattapoisett, Mass.). In last place? No, it's not Silicon Valley.</br></br>But our biggest surprise, given all the news, was just how many hot markets seem to be cooling off. Indeed, according to our survey by housing specialists Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, the growth rate of prices in fully a third of our towns has slowed from the same time frame a year earlier. "There's just air coming out of the market," says David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, who expects price growth to slow nationally to about 4% this year.