“Time marches on ahead, one day we’ll see it.” —a-ha in “Fine Blue Line“

I just love this quote. Truth and ironic comedy blended deliciously. But hey, that’s how real estate works, too.

Today we’re revisiting a feature I first began in 2014 with “Best bang for your buck in Louisville real estate.” At the time I was mostly awed by the impressive values captured by Norton Commons. I mean, $188.06 per square foot was extraordinary. Wait till you see where they are now, but more on that later.

The following year I added a few new sections of Louisville and posted Best bang for your buck in Louisville real estate 2015 on my Louisville Homes Blog. Changes ranged from dropping 5 percent all the way up to seeing Glenview grow by 22 percent. These changes reflect only sold homes, which isn’t truly representative, but it’s the best we’ve got.

Now it’s 2016 and time to crunch the numbers to see where we are today. After all, these past 18 months have seen sales activity pushed higher than ever, and prices are pushing to keep up, too.

So let’s talk about the three new entries.

• Fern Creek: This is a very large suburban district located in the southeast portion of Jefferson County. Most of its housing exists around Bardstown Road from Hurstbourne Parkway out to the large Glenmary neighborhoods.
• Fairdale: Fairdale residential housing is mostly grouped around Outer Loop and New Cut Road.
• Hikes Point: The polygon I used for this part of Louisville combines both the Hikes Point neighborhood and the McMahon fire district. If interested, be sure to check out a great (and free) resource lojic.org that has a wealth of information set to maps.

Changes in Louisville home values by neighborhood

For the stats on each, check these out sorted by least expensive Louisville real estate and moving higher. Averaging all the neighborhoods in this report, we arrive at $123.40 sold price per square foot for 2016.

Observations

Now that we have three years worth of data, here are a some points that stand out to me:

• First, I created the 2015 report in March. This one was done in August more than a year later. Even still, both reports only contain the previous 12 months worth of sold properties, just at different points on the timeline.
• Norton Commons continues to be the most expensive real estate in Louisville. This report only contains Single Family Residences (SFR). Condos can be even more. But, for the geographic areas in this survey, it’s truly amazing that sales have continued to remain consistently positive for this neighborhood. Obviously, people must love the concept.
• It’s clear Norton Commons is in high demand. But it’s surprising to see the very large increases for some of our lowest price-per-square-foot neighborhoods (Newburg, Shively, Valley Station). In part, these areas were undervalued, and this is a market correction. Also, even though home ownership is at its lowest number since 1965, clearly some first-time home buyers are buying in these more affordable parts of Louisville.
• St. Matthews and Lake Forest values hardly budged.
• Despite all the ongoing efforts to enhance Portland, residential real estate is having a difficult time moving higher. There’s still a great deal of work to be done in this area, if housing is even in the cards.
• These are large areas, some having 500+ properties sell each year. Ask your realtor to take a more hyper-local approach when it comes to your home search. If they don’t know what that means, feel free to contact me.