Royal Oak Has Some of Nation's Fastest Increasing Home Values

This home in Royal Oak is listed on Zillow, whose data NerdWallet used in home value study. (Photo via Zillow)

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Personal finance site NerdWallet compared home value increases in 1,300 cities across the U.S. and determined that three Oakland County communities have fastest increasing home values in the nation.

Analyst Courtney Miller used data from the real estate site Zillow to find cities with the biggest increase in home values since 2009.

Miller said the increasing home values, along with January’s report that the nation is adding jobs, is another indication of economic recovery. American homeowners saw the equity in their homes plummet in the Great Recession.

Three Oakland County suburbs – Rochester, Rochester Hills and Royal Oak – made it into the Top 50 cities nationwide.

From January 2009 to December 2014, home prices increased 40.43 percent in Rochester (No. 16 in the ranking), 33.53 percent in Rochester Hills (No. 39) and 32.32 percent in Royal Oak (No. 49).

Some of the key findings:

• Extreme growth is clustered. Not only are all of the top 10 cities in California and Florida, the top spots are grouped around two distinct areas – Silicon Valley and Miami.
• Small and affluent cities. Cities with smaller populations and higher overall home values saw higher rates of growth in home values.
• Tech’s upturn. Seven of our top 10 cites are either in, or are part of, greater Silicon Valley, suggesting that strong tech industry growth has supported an increase in home values and affluence more than any other industry from 2009 to 2014.

Using median home value data from Zillow for January 2009 and December 2014, analysts found the percent change over those years for home values in each city. We broke the data down by number of bedrooms to examine how different size homes performed. Then, using the percent change for all home sizes, we ranked the cities to find where median home value has grown the fastest.

There may be discrepancies between the percentage of growth for specific house sizes and the overall growth rate, which is the percent change in all home prices for all sizes that we used to rank cities. The discrepancies are because home sales data doesn’t always include the number of bedrooms, so in some cases, the change in all prices includes additional houses not accounted for in the individual categories.

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