A friend who lives in Bridge City recently asked me how the Bridge City housing market has been recovering from the Hurricane. So I started doing a little research to see what the statistics would show. Of course, in my opinion, data is always more fun to look at when it is presented in a graph.
As you can see on the graph and might expect,the newer the home the higher price per square foot of value the home retained even after the storm. The older the home the lower value it retained. Homes less than five years old sold for an average of $91.3 per square foot. Homes over 31 years sold for an average of $34.8 per square foot. If I had to guess what happened, I'd guess that older homes were sold "as is" while the newer homes were restored to pre-hurricane condition. You can see there is a fairly distinct price difference when you look at the home sales by age of home.
Another trend worth looking at is the sales price per square foot in any given month. It would seem logical the more time that has passed since the hurricane, the more likely it would be that the homes would be fixed, repaired and restored to pre-hurricane condition and the sales prices would be going up. Let's see what the data shows us.
Analyzing the data this way doesn't show as clear of a trend. For six months after Hurricane Ike flooded Bridge City the average sales price per square foot of living space remained roughly the same at just under $50/square foot. In each given month there were some higher sales and low sales, we are just looking at averages here. *All data from the Orange MLS.
It does appear that over the past two months the sales price, on a cost per square foot basis, has started to climb. This would make sense if you think that almost one year after the storm most home sellers would have repaired the damaged to their homes. The "as is" sales are probably not as common as they were within the first six months after the storm.
Altogether there have been 104 home sales recorded by the Orange MLS since October 2008. The summer months started to show a stronger sales volume. There are countless ways you can look at the data. I'll fiddle with it a little more and see if any other trends appear that are worth noting.
What can we take away from the data about Bridge City home sales post Hurricane Ike? It looks like the newer homes held their value much better than the older homes. It seems like people were willing to invest the time, energy, and money to repair homes that were less than five years old. These homes resold at $91.3/per square foot and that is closely comparable to all homes less than five years old in Southeast Texas.
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