The town of Brownsburg, Indiana sits to the north west of the state’s major metro of Indianapolis. The town is an intersection between the urban heart of Indiana and the remaining rural half. I have lived here much of my life and I can confidently say that it is a comfortable place to live. The crime rate is on the lower end of the spectrum, the school system from my own experience is better than most, its situated so that commute into the city is easy and quick. Couple that with being in easy proximity to the country so that one can easily access it for recreation, the towns culture is welcoming, and the town government seems to be making efforts to better the town by modernizing infrastructure.
All these reasons and others that I am likely blind to, lead to retaliate in the town of Brownsburg being in hot demand. This demand creates a seller’s market; this being where demand out ways supply resulting in an increase in price of a given product, in this case homes in town. This demand also incentives companies to play to this demand, in this situation they just build more houses. This is not difficult here, there was once a lot of farmland in town. Now most of this land has been either developed into subdivisions or is now on the market for development.
With the advent of covid, one would expect to see some form of decrease in demand would they not? I mean, who would move in the middle of a global pandemic? Well of course the demand has not been phased by the advent of a global pandemic, if anything it has increased it! As can be seen from an image of the graph tool on the web site Zillow, it can bee seen that the trend of housing prices in Brownsburg continues ever upward. If you can look closely, one can see that there is a slight but noticeable increase in prices starting in 2020 and continuing to the time of writing; April the 7th, 2021. The median asking price on Zillow was ~$246,638 with a 10.3%-year one change.
The reasons for this mild increase as I see it are that in the age of the pandemic, the city is one of the places in which it can spread the easiest. With all the public transit, close quarters, and in Indianapolis’s case the ability for people from outside the state to come in and possibly spread the virus. Couple this with the general increasing costs of property in most cities across the country and the greater ability for workers in white collar fields to work from home, it is no surprise to me that suburban communities have become an even more attractive home than they were prior to the rise of covid-19.
Another cite that I use to precure information on the housing market was Redfin. I needed to know more nitty gritty details that I couldn’t find on Zillow. As seen below I found as similar graph to the one generated by Zillow’s data. As can also be seen is the general asking price is $270,000 and on a general increase. As also seen is the fact that there is a general decline in the number of homes sold per year. This year has had uncharacteristically low number of houses being sold; demand is still high just seems to be a low supply. Hence the growth of the many subdivisions in the town.
As can be seen from a graph taken from the same cite, it can be seen that there is a general decline in vacancy of the course of the years. Today siting at an average of 3 days on the market. Being at an all-time low, this started in January of last year and is continuing to the day of witting. Said trend can be accounted for in the advent of covid 19 and its further effects on society. It is still a sellers’ market and people are going to take advantage of it, pandemic or not!
The overall trends in the house prices that have appeared during the age of the pandemic are just minor exaggerations of preexisting trends. This isn’t surprising, our town’s government has been trying for growth since I was middle school. It started with new fancier street lamps along specific roads close to where our town meets the interstate and now it’s the implementation of various infrastructure reforms, most notably the conversion of an old railroad to a recreational path and replacement of intersections with roundabouts. Overall I have no opinion on these changes, I just need to record them for future reference.