What happens to real estate values after natural disaster?

I live in an area that was heavily affected by the Hurricane. Entire communities were wiped away. Luckily, our house and neighborhood were fairly untouched (other than some trees down). But 1 mile away there’s no grocery store anymore, roads are destroyed, stores are completely underwater. This destruction will take years to mitigate and rebuild.

In the areas of extreme devastation what happens to the values of real estate in the short and long term?

I’m not selling or buying. I’m genuinely curious based on historic events what happens. This post doesn’t take away from the massive losses our community has.

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It depends on the natural disaster. Some are safe to build after, some not. Lots of the properties go up for sale. The immediate effect is that you have lots of homeless people who are looking for homes and/or work.

The long term effect is that home, auto, and flood insurance rates skyrocket. Some areas won’t be rebuilt.

For the Camp Fire in California housing prices for unaffected areas shot up because there were so many displaced individuals that were looking for homes.

Not sure when it is more regionally widespread destruction where whole regions are displaced.

Our home in Florida was hit by two hurricanes in a month.

The value tripled because it was mostly undamaged, was in an area untouched by floods and storm surge, and people needed housing.

The community quickly recovered from damage.

My aunt has a house torched by forest fire and the entire area burned up. Values stayed low for a long time due to the damage and the destruction of the forest and much of the marketability and attraction to area.

I’d be concerned about housing prices in Ashville climbing higher. I’d be worried the permanent destruction of smaller riverside community.

They can sky rocket if the property was repaired or untouched. I was in a town hit by Ivan and had just bought about 3 months prior for 93500. About 15 mo after Ivan, the inventory in the market was super low. Between so many structures being destroyed, homes and apartment buildings, there was a huge lack of housing. So when I listed and sold, we sold for 148k due to demand.

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If access is limited jobs and amenities affected prices will drop. What happens long term is dependent on what gets replaced. Were the nearby areas completely demolished and replaced with new luxury homes or was this a dying area that people won’t bother to rebuild. One thing is for sure insurance rates will go up.

Typically values are up because the demand for housing is up.

But there is plenty of information available out there for what happened after Katrina and various other huge and devastating hurricanes.

Actually curious about this. My sister used to live in Florida. They sold their first home only to have a hurricane hit a week after they moved out and destroy the roof. They sold their second home at the end of August. She had been panicking most of the summer about the house not selling/selling at a loss. She moved out of Florida because they couldn’t keep up with increasing insurance rates.

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There will be a lot of clean up or rebuilding. Problem is a lot of non insured contractors come into town and do shotty work on homes with mold growing and that flooded. Now you’ve got bad work on putting homes back together so when they go to sell you’re dealing with that. Also, people know when they buy they are in a flood zone or not. We’ve sold 2 homes in a A flood zone no problem