HOUSINGNEWSREPORT
and the central business district,” said Ragas, a retired University of New Orleans finance professor. Ragas said the New Orleans residential real estate market has been appreciating at 10 percent a year. But Ragas said the appreciation has slowed in the last six months due to a decline in job growth, slowing export trade through the Port of New Orleans, and low oil prices, which has reduced demand for homes driven by the job growth in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry. Smaller, Whiter City After Katrina, the population of New Orleans slumped to a low of 209,000 from 455,000 before the hurricane. Today, the city’s population is expanding again, growing to an estimated 389,617 last year, up 13
percent from 343,829 people in April 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau .
growing from 15,000 in 2010 to 18,000 in 2015, accounting for 5 percent of the city’s population, Census figures show. Flippers Active Home flipping in the New Orleans metro area jumped 45 percent from a year ago in Q1 2016 — the sixth biggest year-over- year increase among 126 metros, tracked by ATTOM Data Solutions (formerly RealtyTrac .) In the first quarter, 8.6 percent of all home sales in New Orleans were flips, ranking 25th highest among the 126 metro areas analyzed. “There’s a flipping market, but it’s getting harder to do because of rising home prices,” said Ragas, noting that flippers have started scooping up even the more run-down properties in less desirable areas where housing stock is available. “There’s more flipping north of St. Charles. There’s a huge quantity of vacant stock and empty lots there.” In New Orleans, home flips in Q1 2016 sold for $81,500 more than what they were purchased for, a 97.6 percent gross return on investment (ROI), more than twice the national average of 47.8 percent. At the parish level, Jefferson Parish had the most single family home and condo flips of any parish statewide (112) in the first quarter, representing 9.2 percent of all home sales. Orleans Parish saw the biggest year-over- year increase in the flipping rate, up 81 percent from a year ago. Orleans Parish also had the biggest gross ROI of 141 percent.
The numbers portray a significantly smaller, whiter city than the previous census, in 2000, though the population had been steadily shrinking for decades prior to the storm. In 1990, New Orleans was the 24th biggest city in the country, in 2000, the 31st, and by 2015 was the 50th most populous city, reports the Census . The racial and ethnic make-up is also changing. New Orleans, once more than two-thirds black, is now 60 percent black, with 118,000 fewer black residents. In 2015, whites accounted for 33 percent of the city’s population. Meanwhile, the Hispanic population, which came to fill the city’s ravenous demand for construction labor after the storm, jumped 20 percent,
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