Des Moines

The following is taken from an October 2008 article in Bizjournals about the United States housing markets, and looking specifically at the Des Moines metro area, including Indianola.

Bizjournals ranks the Des Moines metro area, including Indianola, as the 90th most populous metro area in the country but the 28th best growth engine. 

The specter of a prior real estate bubble helped Iowa avoid the current bust. After an agricultural debt crisis in the 1980s, when many farmers found themselves owing much more than the value of their land, Iowa began an aggressive push to diversify its economy. Many of the resulting development subsidies have contributed to a thriving region around Des Moines, the capital. Major insurance and financial-services companies call Des Moines home, including the Principal Financial Group. The media company Meredith Corporation, publisher of Ladies’ Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens, also maintains its headquarters in the city. Young people flocking to jobs here from other parts of Iowa have helped keep housing demand steady. But homebuyers in these high-paying, white-collar jobs don’t need to stretch much to afford the metro area’s median home price of $156,600.
Though it’s undergone a slight slowdown this year, Des Moines’s real estate market never crashed, in part because it didn’t experience much of a run-up. “Nobody here was flipping houses,” says David Swenson, an economist with Iowa State University.

The suburb of West Des Moines is a particularly strong market, with only six to seven months of inventory, compared with 10 or 11 months in other parts of the metro area. Much of West Des Moines’s housing stock is new construction, both condos and single-family homes, but some historic flavor remains in the Valley Junction neighborhood, a collection of antique shops and other retailers in storefronts dating from the late 19th century. Tom Bernau, 47, moved this spring with his wife and 2-year-old son into a new, five-bedroom home on the third fairway of a private golf course in the city. The couple moved to West Des Moines for its excellent public schools, but before their son starts kindergarten, he’s keeping busy at the country club next door. “We can take our golf cart from our house and go to the pool without going on a city street,” Bernau says.