The health of the housing market is usually gauged by the percentage of home sales, foreclosures and mortgage rates. While the economy has a huge effect on the housing market, how would politics really affect the property sector?
MarketWatch and RealtyTrac together released a report that attempts to answer just that. The report analyzed 1,500 counties across states and scored them on the usual housing trend indicators like foreclosure starts, underwater homes, median home prices, unemployment rates and price growth to find which areas were "better off" than a year or two ago.
The report found that 52 percent of the housing markets in the United States were doing better than two years ago, while 11 percent were "worse off". Thirty six percent of them were categorized under "toss up".
What significantly stood out in the report was the housing markets that had a majority of Republicans (Red) were performing better than those that had a Democratic (Blue) majority. Seventy eight percent of the red states were better off as compared to the fifty three percent of the blue states, MarketWatch reported.
"Whether because of good government policy, sheer luck or otherwise, the majority of county housing markets in six of the eight states with close U.S. Senate races are better off than they were two years ago. This should favor the incumbent, or the incumbent's party, all else being equal -- which of course we know it is not. The only exceptions were Iowa and Alaska, where the majority of county housing markets were classified as toss-ups compared with two years ago," Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac, explained in a statement.
The reason for the divide wasn't exactly clear but according to Blomquist it could be because the republicans handled the foreclosure crisis better. But, because the red states are more rural and were less hit by the housing market crash, that could also have given those areas an upper hand.
As the elections inch closer, several reports polarizing blue and red states have been doing the rounds. Recently, the Urban Land Institute released a report which showed that 18 of the 20 most charitable states voted for republican candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 election. But the report also noted that the Democrats won the race when it came to itemizing on tax returns, the Blue states won over the red states.
Read the full report here.
