Looking today at home value changes by neighborhood type.

Even within a region, prices and price changes can vary widely by neighborhood type. A lower-cost rural neighborhood won’t necessarily have the same price growth pressures - or price growth prospects - as high-priced downtown neighborhoods. As such, Homeworthi categorizes every neighborhood by its price and development intensity. The price and development categories are listed below.

Over the past year, price changes have differed among neighborhood types. Moderately priced neighborhoods have on the whole outperformed affordable and premium markets, though the differences are fairly slight. However, development intensity continues to be a major differentiator in price growth, with rural and suburban neighborhoods outperforming denser, more development-intense neighborhoods. In fact, price growth in rural and suburban neighborhoods was nearly 50% higher than intown and downtown neighborhoods (though both neighborhood types still had double-digit price growth in 2021).

Interestingly, if we combine price and development intensity as Homeworthi does in its evaluations, some interesting patterns emerged:

- Notably premium-priced rural neighborhoods had the highest price increase of any neighborhood type, with the average neighborhood home value increasing 21%. It's pretty clear that wealthier households continued to prefer open space over dense access. Premium rural and suburban neighborhoods, strongly outperformed premium neighborhoods in and around downtowns: in fact, premium downtown and in-town neighborhoods were by far the worst performers.

- Despite density being a drag on prices overall, affordable downtowns and moderately-priced intowns returned average to above-average rates. Importantly, this may be an early signal of a return to cities, at least for those not in the highest income brackets.