There is no other way but up for home prices in Boston, Boston Globe reports.
Standard & Poors released a report Thursday which includes data that sees Boston's home values climbing 24 per cent up by the year 2020. Looking at 48 markets all across the country, the Wall Street rating agency is trying to measure where the last few years of strong home price growth is heading - is it continuing or cooling down?
The prediction greatly rests on how the economy is looking.
With things to continue more or less apace, that 24 per cent prediction will be hit right on the spot. However, S&P predicts home prices to increase to as much as 49 per cent if the economy will perform better than expected.
What really proves Boston's strong housing market is its corresponding downside risk - and there is not much.
Should there be another wave of recession that is of the same magnitude as that of 2007's economic downturn, Boston's house prices are only going down less than 2 per cent, according to S&P. Still, with the worst-case scenario in mind, S&P will only see a slip of 6 per cent - a far smaller rate compared to the 27 per cent plunge on a national scale.
Darrell Wheeler, who co-authored the report and a structure finance researcher at S&P said that Boston is among the three or four markets in the country that are at the lowest risk.
"Boston is one of the more stable markets in the country," Wheeler said. "It has a broad scope of industries that are able to withstand economic events much better than many other markets."
Boston's housing market is definitely set in a good direction. Thanks to the growing population of young professionals who are going into the home-buying stage at a much earlier time mixed in with increasing number of universities and medical institutions that equate to large number of employees.
