As yet another gay pride month dawns, allow me to suggest Johnstown declare June to be real estate pride month in the area.
We’ve touched on this topic recently, but evidence of the astounding decoupling between the area real estate market and that of the nation writ large continues to come to light and begs for an update. In an astonishing departure from the norm, we’re actually doing better than many.
We seem to be a buy, update, and flip area when it comes to houses. We’re not talking about the ridiculous plans to pave over Central Park and remove the centerpiece fountain, an initiative moving ahead despite public unhappiness because there is federal grant money to be spent (wasted?) and Johnstown is deep blue when it comes to sucking the public teat without accountability or concern for utility of those spent funds.
I’ve heard of no plans to sell Central Park, yet. But, national real estate news paints Johnstown as an outlier, to the upside.
Just last week, we saw that pending home sales nationally were at a 30-month low. Pending sales are those for which an offer has been accepted, but details such as financing are not yet complete.
Using the handy realtor.com resource, we find homes selling at what we’d describe as a brisk pace. And at seriously higher prices.
Consider a listing in the 15905 zip code. It’s along Sherwood Drive, which sounds like somewhere Robin Hood might want to live.
This three-bedroom, two-bath ranch style home is “impeccably updated” according to the listing. One would hope so, in the view of the asking price of $205,000, up from the last listed sales price of $22,400 in September 2023.
This despite the house being in the Greater Johnstown School District, not exactly a selling point for anyone with children. Then again, early tellings of Robin Hood mentioned no children, despite dalliances with Maid Marian.
This one still is on the market. Many others are not.
Four of the first eight homes under the new listing category on realtor.com already are tagged as pending. One has a sales price up $74,500 since the last sale in 2022. Another was up $62,900 from a 2022 sales price.
A third was a relatively paltry $38,900 higher than a 2019 sales price, but it was a considerable percentage move considering this is a lower priced home.
And the fourth pending listing is new construction, with no prior sales baseline. I’ll be watching for it to show up again a few years hence, probably marked up $70,000 or so.
Let’s return to the national picture. According to a post last night on zerohedge.com, nearby Pittsburgh is the second most affordable housing market in these United States, trailing only Detroit, the Michigan city that reportedly has more than 22 percent of its houses sitting vacant.
This zerohedge story cites WalletHub as the source and says the calculations it made factor in cost per square foot, median income, real estate tax rates and median sales prices.
No town under 100,000 in population was considered, so Johnstown was not even close to being evaluated.
Just as well because, considering recent real estate transactions, Johnstown would not have made the top 20, and probably not the top 200.
My unsolicited advice to would-be sellers here, act quickly before this admittedly sustained bit of outperformance by a Johnstown market ends abruptly, as it must.
Sam Ross Jr's site 