Real estate booms; median price up 50 percent in three years

Earlier this month a four-bedroom, two-bath house with a garage and a finished basement in a nice neighborhood in Columbia Falls went on the market for a list price of about $340,000.

It was under contract in two days.

That’s indicative of just how hot the real estate market is right now in Columbia Falls.

About 10 years ago, there was a foreclosed home on nearly every block.

No more.

Interest rates are low, people are “escaping” the cities due to coronavirus concerns and Columbia Falls is not being overlooked.

“There’s an unprecedented pent-up demand,” Erick Robbins, a real estate

agent with Re/Max Mountain View in Columbia Falls said last week.

Robbins has been selling real estate in the city since 2003 and has seen the ebbs and flows, booms and busts in the market, but this summer has been one for the history books.

Just three years ago the median price in Columbia Falls was $225,500 Robbins noted.

Year to date it’s $336,100.

That’s an increase of about 50 percent.

Robbins said low inventory has been a problem for a couple of years now, but “since the pandemic it’s been exacerbated.”

“It’s a great time to be seller,” he noted. “But hopefully you have a place to land.”

This summer when a home

hits the market it often will see multiple offers at or above list price. “It’s been pretty wild,” he said. “A lot of cash transactions. People just writing checks.”

There is a downside to all of this: Working class folks are having a difficult time finding homes they can afford.

A $300,000 mortgage is about $1,900 a month with taxes and insurance.

The demand is both from in-state and out-ofstate buyers. Part of it is homebuyers don’t have to sit in an office in a city anymore. They can do their work from home through the Internet.

The out-of-state demand is clearly having an influence, Robbins noted.

Not surprisingly, city building permits have been on the rise as well.

To date, the city has issued 53 permits totaling $18,064,970 in building value. That includes

$11.482 million in commercial real estate permits and $5.324, million in residential real estate.

To date that means 17 new single family residences with an average price of $313,191. It also includes about $208,000 in home improvements.

The commercial real estate, however, includes the remodel of Ruder Elementary School.

Columbia Falls is not alone, of course. The median prices in other cities has boomed as well. In August, Whitefish saw 79 units sold with a median price of $567,000 and Kalispell saw 144 units with a median price of $367,000.

Still, Robbins noted, those prices could be relatively low compared to where people have moved from. The cost of materials has also risen sharply. At one point, lumber market futures were above $830 per thousand board feet in August. They’ve since

settled a bit to about $600, but in April when the country was virtually shut down, it was in the $260 range.

To put that in a realworld perspective, an 8-foot, 2-by-4 retailed for about $2.78 a year ago, noted Brent Hartley, distribution manager for Western Building Centers. Today the same board retails for $7.20.

Hartley said one problem is that mills shut down entirely during the beginning of the pandemic, which lowered supplies. He said if things had not shut down, there still would be high demand, but it probably wouldn’t have been this acute.