Columbus Ohio… College Town
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
“Please remember that Real Estate is LOCAL”
In a post titled “Please remember that Real Estate is LOCAL” China Moon Crowell. a real estate agent from the Madison Wisconsin area pointed out a New York Times article that I missed. I missed the article in “The Nation” because it failed to mention Columbus Ohio among the college towns. “College Towns Escape the Pain.”
OK Columbus is a bit big to call a college town but Coldwell Banker referred to Columbus as a college town last year. OSU is super sized… maybe that makes Columbus a super sized college town…Or just Columbus size as the 15th largest US city.
Of course Columbus Ohio would not be mentioned in this New York Times article was about small cities:
“The list of metropolitan areas with the smallest percentage of high-cost home loans is dominated by small cities with big colleges, including Ithaca, N.Y.; Iowa City; Madison, Wis.; Morgantown, W.V.; and State College, Pa.”
Bruce Katz with the Brookings Institution (Katz loomed large in the recent Columbus Dispatch article about Ohio’s big cities….) is quoted in the New York Times article:
“Where subprimes are turning up is in hot markets, but also in places like Cleveland and Detroit,” Mr. Katz said. “College towns are more stable places in some respects. If you make between $75,000 and $125,000 in these places, you can get into a pretty decent home and still have very reasonable ratios.”
In one of the audio comments in the Columbus Dispatch series Katz talked about the Ohio Brain Drain and mentioned Madison Wisconsin as a hot place for young, educated people. He said Ohio’s cities are losing young educated people to cities in the southwest and southeast US and then mentioned Chicago, Minneapolis and Madison.
Columbus is the third most stable housing market in the country according to Forbes.com and Moody’s Economy.com I think that study / article looked at bigger cities so you won’t see the Madison, State College PA, Iowa City size cities on that list.
Look at the Multimedia map in the November 4, 2007 New York Times article.
National average 29% of loans are subprime…
Look at Central Ohio…
Franklin county 29%
Delaware county 17%
Cleveland area
Cuyahoga County is 36%
Lake County is 24%
Geuga County is only 16%
Cincinnati area
Hamilton County is only 28%
Columbus as a college town:
Nov. 6, 2006 - College Towns Columbus Ohio on Discover Columbus
How expensive is Columbus in comparison to the small cities that the New York Times wrote about… this is last year, 2006 info from the Coldwell Banker table, article, if you want to see how we compared to other college towns like Ann Arbor MI, Evanston IL use the link above to Discover Columbus:
“Columbus, Ohio, home to Bowl Series Championship leader Ohio State University, was number 62 on the affordability ranking at $251,364, approximately $108,000 less than the national average of $359,779 for the 119 studied college markets.
Iowa - Iowa City, IA 2006 - Avg. Price $208,691
Ohio State - Columbus, OH 2006 - Avg. Price $251,364
Wisconsin - Madison, WI 2006 - Avg. Price $279,500
Penn State - State College, PA 2006 - Avg. Price $306,950″
Thanks to China Moon Crowell (what a great name) for bringing the New York Times article to my attention… even if the New York Times article does not mention Columbus. Real estate really is local.
