City places in housing index

Real estate company Coldwell Banker has released its annual College Home Price Comparison Index and found Bloomington among the top 10 college towns with the lowest average home price.

The index ranks the average price of a 2,200-square foot, four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom home in the 117 cities that house Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) schools.

Though the ranking is geared more toward post-graduates and less toward students, the average cost of housing still correlates fairly closely with the cost of living in an area.

Bloomington ranked ninth in the nation with an average home price of $164,433, a drop in more than $31,000 from its 2008 price of $196,000.

But real estate agents in the area said that this year’s numbers are an inaccurate representation of the Bloomington housing market.

Jim Strague, Broker Associate for Bloomington RE/MAX, said the numbers are completely misleading. Strague said Bloomington is currently the No. 2 housing market in the state, and housing prices are much higher.

W.R. Dunn, owner of W.R. Dunn Real Estate, an agency formerly related to Coldwell Banker, also said this year’s numbers shouldn’t have dropped by more than 10 percent. Dunn said a house of those specifications usually sells for a higher price.

A possible explanation for the discrepancy in figures is because, for the first time, no Coldwell Banker agency is serving Bloomington.

The figures for Bloomington and 10 other cities were compiled following a different methodology. Numbers for Bloomington were from a local Multiple Listing Service collected in September, instead of being calculated in Coldwell Banker offices.

Muncie, home of Ball State University, ranked second in the nation for the second year in a row with an average home price of $144,996.

Ball State’s Mid-American Conference rival, the University of Akron in Ohio, easily reported the lowest figures with an average home price $23,000 lower than in Muncie.
Palo Alto, Calif., home of Stanford University, came in with the highest prices in the nation, just less than $1.5 million, nearly $143,000 more than the next closest city on the list, Los Angeles.

That strikingly high number might play some role in 89 percent of Stanford’s 6,700 undergraduate students living on campus, though most will likely not complain.
Stanford ranked 20th on The Princeton Review’s Dorms Like Palaces list for all schools and first out of schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Despite the case at Stanford, an extremely high or low-cost housing market doesn’t always result in students staying on or off campus.

Ball State houses 43 percent of its undergraduates on campus, a fairly high number for a state school. The University of California Berkeley houses only 35 percent of its undergraduates on campus despite the average price of a home in the area costing nearly $1.3 million.

For the 64 percent of undergraduates at IU that live off-campus, renting in some form is generally the way out of campus housing, but those who decide to buy houses can find it monetarily rewarding.

W.R. Dunn said some advantages of buying a house are the possibility of getting money back when reselling it after school and collecting rent from roommates.
But the process isn’t always as simple as reselling and expecting a full return on an investment.

“In real estate now, it’s really hard to guarantee anyone that they’re going to make money or lose money,” said Laura Hernandez, realtor agent for Coldwell Banker Lunsford in Muncie.

Hernandez recommended that any student looking into purchasing a home for school talk to an accountant and conduct thorough research on the home.

Because Indiana Homestead Law only allows couples to file exemptions on one property, houses owned by parents of students can also face increased property taxes.

“Students buying a home isn’t a good or bad thing to do,” Hernandez said. “You just need to  do your homework.”