WASHINGTON -- Where have housing values appreciated most over the past two decades? California? Texas? Somewhere else in the Sunbelt?

None of the above.

According to the latest tally from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the winner is -- drum roll please -- Massachusetts.

Massachusetts? Yup, that's right. On average, folks who bought a house in Massachusetts in 1980 and sold it sometime in the first quarter of this year turned a tidy little profit of 364.1 percent.

New Yorkers did almost as well, according to OFHEO, which regulates the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-chartered corporations which bring liquidity to the mortgage market. Over the 21-year period, people in the Empire State saw their housing investment grow by an average of 277.8 percent.

What about California? Home owners their didn't fair badly. Their investments tripled. But Rhode Islanders did a little better at 213.8 percent, as did New Jerseyites and New Hampshirites at 208.6 percent and 202.1 percent, respectively.

OFHEO's quarterly surveys are considered far more accurate gauges of housing price appreciation than other government studies because they tracks repeat sales and refinancings on the same single-family properties.

Also, since the data is based on the combined mortgage records of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together have the nation's largest database of mortgage transactions, it is a much broader measure of the movement in house prices.

The two government sponsored enterprise keep the money flowing to the mortgage market by purchasing loans from local lenders and packaging them into securities for sale to investors throughout the world.

The national average appreciation rate for the 21-year period was 156.3 percent, and only 21 states did better.

And what about those other Sunbelt states where everybody seems to be heading? They didn't do nearly as well.

In Florida, owners only doubled their money. Well, the appreciation rate averaged 122.7 percent in the Sunshine State, if you want to be exact. In Arizona, it was 116.4 percent. But in Texas, the rate was a mere 73.4 percent.

The worst rate of appreciation, though, was in Oklahoma, where someone who bought a house in 1980 earned only an average of 56.4 percent when they sold this year. And Wyoming and Alaska weren't far behind at 61.2 percent and 65.6 percent, respectively.

For more articles by Lew Sichelman, please press here.

Published: June 11, 2001

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