Home values across Alabama – and the nation – continued to surge through the first part of 2022, though the acceleration has slowed slightly in the last few months, with some notable exceptions.
Alabama’s largest cities have seen prices increase steadily throughout the pandemic, but those urban cores can’t compete with the home values in the suburbs.
According to data from Zillow, the value of single family homes in the suburbs surrounding Birmingham and Huntsville, as well as in the small cities across the bay from Mobile, far outstrip those within the cities proper. Here’s a look at the value by suburb in each of those major metro areas.
Birmingham
The Birmingham-Hoover metro area is by far the largest in Alabama, and it has some of the highest variance in home values. Birmingham proper has the lowest median home value of any of the state’s largest cities, and its values are much lower than some of its closest neighbors, and have starting to trend downward.
In the Birmingham-Hoover metro area, among cities with at least 20,000 people, Birmingham saw the lowest median home prices. Birmingham is also unique in that home prices have seen a bit of a turndown starting in February, while values in surrounding cities continue to rise.
As of June, the most recent month for which data was available, the average single-family home in Birmingham was worth about $125,000. At the other extreme, the median home value in Mountain Brook was $822,000.
Huntsville
Home values in the Rocket City are much higher, on average, than those in Alabama’s other large cities, including Birmingham and Mobile. The average home there was worth roughly $303,000 in June, a significant increase even since the start of 2022.
But homes in neighboring Madison tend to be even more valuable. According to Zillow’s data, half of all single-family homes in Madison were priced higher than $366,000 in June.
Athens, across the county line in fast-growing Limestone County, saw slightly lower home values than Huntsville, but recorded a solid increase over time. Athens is the only Birmingham, Huntsville or Mobile-area city with at least 20,000 people with home values less than their metro area’s core city.
Mobile
Mobile is a different animal than the other two, because the nearby ‘suburban’ areas aren’t actually suburbs. The Mobile metro area include Mobile and Washington counties, but Mobile is the only city in those counties with at least 20,000 people. But just across Mobile Bay in Baldwin County there is a trio of fast-growing cities that have seen lots of variation in housing prices.
The Daphne-Fairhope-Foley metro area in Baldwin County is one of the fastest growing metros in the country, and houses in each of those three cities tend to be, on average, much more valuable than those in Mobile.
Fairhope, has by far the most valuable houses of that group, with a median home value of $514,000 as of June. But that number has been a bit of a rollercoaster over the last several months, and is actually down significantly since February, when home values there peaked at a median price of nearly $591,000.
Home values in Daphne and Foley are quite similar, and the two have see-sawed back and forth over the past year. In June, Foley jumped on top again, with a median home value of $315,000, compared to Daphne’s $309,000.