ASHEVILLE - Despite damages to over 9,000 residential units in Buncombe County alone from Tropical Storm Helene, the region’s housing market has been “extremely resilient,” given the circumstances, a local real estate market analyst said. Yet, the lasting impacts Helene may have on the area’s housing market in 2025 may depend on the resilience of the region’s economy.
Zac Ruiz, an Asheville-based software engineer and real estate agent, has been providing updates on Helene’s impact to the housing market through his property data service the Ruiz Report.
Ruiz’s analysis of the post-Helene housing market has come in the form of a three part series that utilizes Multiple Listing Service data to generate graphs that are updated daily with new market information. So far, Ruiz has released two parts of the series. One part looks at housing on the market during the Helene and another part looks at inventory and sales after.
“I’m not trying to predict anything. I’m trying to kind of report on what happened,” Ruiz said of his reports.
Early impacts of Helene saw the region’s home sales and new listings essentially halt, but in the past few months those patterns have changed. By most metrics, the analysis has shown the market to be resilient in the face of the region’s worst natural disaster.
Particularly, new listings in the region, meaning the return of supply to Asheville’s housing market, has shown to be a “resounding vote of confidence” given Helene’s damage to residential units, Ruiz said. On Dec. 17, County Manager Avril Pinder reported that the storm damaged 9,234 residential units in Buncombe. Of those units, 331 were destroyed while 609 suffered major damage.
In the months after the storm, new listings in Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison and McDowell counties started slowly, but eventually even outpaced previous years of new listings, where the market typically cools in November and December. The seven counties saw 819 new listings between Sept. 27 and Oct. 31, 1,094 in November and 786 in December. While new listing activity in Buncombe County was down over 50% in October compared to 2023, listing activity in November and December increased by 11% and 29%, respectively, outpacing previous years
After the storm, the homes that withdrew from the market – be it from damages or hesitancy to sell – did not lead to a decline in inventory, Ruiz’s data indicates. The news is positive for those who are still looking to buy in a region where inventory is notoriously low.
“All I’m doing is inferring here, but that is a representation of just how many of those homes were pent up – that were on the sidelines,” Ruiz said.
The home price difference between December 2023 and 2024 was also of note. Median homes sales for December 2024 increased to around $475,000 compared to around $453,000 in December 2023. The nearly 5% increase is lower than the reported 9% jump made between December 2022 and 2023, according to data provided by Canopy MLS. The rapid growth in home prices that has plagued the county in recent years may be slowing down.
“My personal opinion is that prices won’t necessarily decrease, but certainly the rate of increase will cool,” Ruiz said. “We’ve already seen that.”
Uncertain economic impacts in 2025
While Ruiz believes the past few months after the storm have shown resilience in the market, he noted that one of the biggest uncertainties of 2025’s housing market is how the recovery of region’s economy could impact it. In November, Buncombe County had the second highest unemployment rate in North Carolina at 7.2%, only behind Mitchell County at 8.9%.
Unemployment has largely impacted those in the service and hospitality industries, where restaurant owners have been forced to quickly close, have seen businesses destroyed or have had employees displaced by the storm. The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority estimated that service and hospitality businesses that cater to tourism, the region’s largest industry, saw a 70% decline in the last months of 2024.
“Buncombe County went from the lowest unemployment in North Carolina to the highest. You can’t pretend that’s not happening,” Ruiz said, noting it will likely have an effect on the real estate market.
Already, apartment complex owners and developers say that some renters are considering leaving or have left the region, which could have an impact on rental prices.
Asheville-based Developer Harry Pilos told the Citizen Times that he’s already seen rental price drops for units he owns, that he saw “dramatically less people looking for apartments” in the first half of December. He, like Ruiz, attributed the decline to the lack of jobs and economic opportunity for those who are looking to rent in Asheville.
“You’ve got a whole class of people who now can’t make a living because the businesses they work for are closed,” Pilos said.
‘Helene homes’ will indicate further impacts
As a final part of his three part series, Ruiz will look at long-term effects Helene has had on Asheville’s housing market, primarily through the lens of the homes that were on the market during the storm. The “Helene homes,” as Ruiz calls them, may be able to point to the broader impacts that the storm had on the market and housing in general in the region, he said.
While the positive news about the housing market means that a major industry in Western North Carolina is bouncing back, the data isn’t the whole story, Ruiz said.
“I think the data is gonna tell the tale that it wasn’t as bad as it was because, by and large, geographically. Most people just dealt with downed trees and utilities services,” he said. “That’s not going to do justice to the people whose home is no longer where it used to be. To the people who are still displaced today.”
[Collection]citizen-times.com