“I think every single market looks different as it always does. I think it’s just maybe that people are feeling it a little bit more when we get in these cycles,” she said of the current high-interest-rate environment. “But for us, our area’s growing tremendously with big businesses coming in. So that’s kind of helping us offset what the overall market is doing as well.
“Those are things you can’t control in your own individual areas. But we’re extremely grateful here that we’re seeing that influx of business moving to our area, which is helping us… You have to prepare six months ago for what your business is doing now, and I feel like we just did a really good job in getting ready for that and working ahead and not behind.”
Other states with the most affordable house prices and costs of living, Forbes said, include Kansas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri and Iowa. Meanwhile, a research team at USA TODAY found New York, California, and Hawaii were unsurprisingly the least affordable states – joined, unexpectedly, by Louisiana.
What’s next for housing affordability in the US?
New Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) data painted a grim picture of the affordability outlook facing would-be buyers, with the organization’s Applications Payment Index (PAPI) showing the national median mortgage payment sought by homebuyers increased from $2,201 in March to $2,256 in April.
That index gauges how new monthly mortgage payments vary relative to income, and showed that the pace of growth in average payments outstripped wage increases between April 2023 and April 2024.
