Louisville homeowners see their home values rise 13 percent during the first half of 2012

With the ever increasing amount of information at our fingertips, (thank you Al Gore!) the analyst’s sandbox is now made up of smaller and smaller buckets. In the world of real estate, we call this hyperlocal.

Where we once measured states, then counties, then ZIP codes we can now further dissect the housing market by MLS areas or even Louisville neighborhoods.

Last year we published a piece that looked at Louisville home values as they changed by MLS area from the end of 2010 to the end of 2011. Check back, if you like.

I wanted to continue gathering more data and see how these areas performed for the first half of 2012. Who’s with me?! (And the geeks rejoiced.)

This time, for our starting point, instead of grabbing the median home value for a single month, I took the average of 12 months worth of medians. Don’t worry, no humans were harmed in the slicing of this data.

I then compared this with this June’s median home sale value for each area. The chart below shows the results.

These are very encouraging results after a three year slide.

Below is chart of how the Louisville MLS areas stacked up, with Area 1 (Downtown, Old Louisville, Shively, West Louisville and Butchertown) coming out on top.

Keep in mind that the smaller the sample size, the greater the opportunity for variation. Areas 0 and 1 sell the fewest homes out of all the Louisville MLS areas.

For Jefferson County as a whole (combine Areas 0-9) the results are quite encouraging. The average home sale price for all of 2011 according to Greater Louisville Association of Realtors data was $130,000. Compare that to the median during the month of June, $146,875, and we see a 12.98 percent increase!

I’m sure there’s a margin of error in there somewhere but I can’t figure it out. Heck, I sell houses. I don’t crunch numbers.

The point of this piece is that after three long years of mostly declining values, it’s about time Louisville homeowners start getting a better return on their investment.