I’m doing some appraisal work in the Pleasant Grove, AL area this week and ran across some interesting sales trends. If you recall, a major tornado came through the Pleasant Grove area in April of 2011, causing catastrophic damage. Houses were totally destroyed and blown off of their foundations. Since then recovery has been slow.
When I was out there I discovered new homes being built, and existing homes being repaired from the tornado damage. While doing research on vacant land sales I discovered an interesting, but expected occurrence. Take a look at the two photos below to see what I am talking about.
In the first photo you can see a slight variation in color of the land where the tornado tore through the city, between the two red lines. The tornado uprooted trees and destroyed the landscaping, exposing the earth below. When I was doing a search of land sales and listings the majority of lots are located in the path of the storm, with a lesser amount being scattered around in various other parts of the city. While some people have rebuilt in this area it also appears that many have decided to sell and leave. The larger than normal number of vacant lots for sale has created an unstable market for this type of property. The Birmingham Multiple Listing Service shows that there are approximately 64 residential lots for sale from $5,000 to $42,500. Since the tornado, 15 lots have sold with prices ranging from $1,215 to 21,000.
In the coming weeks I plan on sharing more interesting data that I find about Pleasant Grove and try to answer questions about how sales volume and price have been effected by the tornado. Stay tuned to see the results.
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Interesting, Tom. Is there any stigma among recent listings or sales associated with being located in the path of a previous tornado? All this tornado talk is foreign to me since I’m in California. We do earthquakes instead.
From my initial analysis it appears there is some stigma based on the prices of recent lot sales and current listings. I will be looking in more detail at house sales and price trends, and post the report soon. What are your findings in regard to earthquakes?
Thanks. I’ll look forward to that post. Honestly, there aren’t any big earthquake faults in the Sacramento area, so it’s not an issue. The Bay Area a couple hours away of course had a huge earthquake during the World Series a couple decades ago. I grew up in Southern California though, and we had earthquakes all the time. We rarely have them in my area, though they do happen occasionally.
Good to hear you are not in a very dangerous area.