JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Alicia Bynum is happy to be back in her hometown and promoting Northeast Tennessee’s beauty and quality of life, but the 33-year-old faced a problem she never expected when she moved away from the area more than a decade ago.

“Growing up here, I never thought it would be a barrier to find affordable housing,” said Bynum, who is finally on the verge of homeownership after about 18 months of searching for something she wanted and could afford.

Young home buyers in Tri-Cities say affordability a major challenge

“It’s been really bittersweet. I work in tourism, so I help to promote folks to this area. So on one hand, I get really excited to see our economy flourish and for tourism to be a number one driver in Tennessee. On the flip side, I’m local and I can’t afford to live here in the area that I promote.”

Northeast Tennessee Association of Realtors (NETAR) President Michelle Davis is hopeful that like Bynum, more of the region’s prospective buyers in the $150,000 to high-$200,000s market will find themselves fulfilling the American Dream this year than last.

Data points to increasing inventory in the sub-$300,000 market, where the supply had dropped to just over three weeks’ worth when things got their tightest last year.

“We’re at about two and a half months worth of inventory out there for that $300,000 and below,” Davis told News Channel 11. “That means we need another month and a half worth of inventory before we make it to a neutral market.”

Bynum can attest to what it’s like to search for an affordable starter home in a market where inventory is tight and competition includes investors and cash buyers moving in from other areas.

Not too long after returning to the place she was raised, Bynum started thinking about owning her own place. Though she’d grown up in one of the nation’s most affordable markets, that’s not what she found in late 2022.

“It was a lot of looking at houses and thinking, ‘Oh, this is the one,’ and facing auctions, and bids,” Bynum said. “It’s really been a bidding market, so placing my highest and best offer to learn that it was bought out by a cash offer happened many times.”

It wasn’t a good feeling for the mother of a now 6-year-old daughter, who said she felt “crushed, and at times I just thought, I’m never going to own a house.”

NETAR’s Davis said several things contributed to the crunch. For one, local homebuilders pulled back on the number of “spec” homes they were building after a recession that carried into around 2014 in the housing market. Additionally, Northeast Tennessee homeowners tend to stay in their homes three to five years longer than the national average.

Then came in-migration — people moving to the Tri-Cities during and after the pandemic, some with fistfuls of cash from selling where they’d lived, others with fewer means but still needing places to either rent or buy. The combination added a further barrier for first-time buyers in the form of investors who’d buy homes in order to rent them out at increasingly steep rates.

A couple of things have helped move the needle, Davis said. Homebuilding is picking up, with at least a portion of those new builds falling in the affordable category. Rental-to-purchase rates have stabilized, so buying a home to rent out has become somewhat less attractive to investors.

“Our wages have improved some, so that’s making an impact in allowing people to be a part of that homebuying experience,” Davis said, though she added, “We need more jobs in this area that are higher paying.”

By the end of the month, barring unforeseen circumstances, Bynum will own a house — a nice little two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath in the Fall Branch community. She’s excited about the move, even though she didn’t get everything she was hoping for when she started her search.

“It’s rural so that was check the mark, but it’s been a lot of sacrifice,” she said. “My list of wants for a first-time house in this market dropped somewhat significantly. I wanted at least two acres of land, and that’s something that just was not attainable … and I’m still on the upper end of my budget.”

Bynum believes persistence was a big factor in her pending payoff, though she hopes inventory keeps rising.

“It’s opened up a little bit, not much,” she said. “If I wasn’t looking every single day, day and night as I have been, then even finding what I’ve been fortunate to find now would have been next to impossible.”

She would like to see the housing market come to some sort of equilibrium so that people who grew up here or are otherwise working median-wage jobs can have the same opportunities their parents had. If that doesn’t happen, a crucial part of what’s attracting so many people from outside the area could disappear.

“I feel like the local community, we’re the ones who kind of keep this Appalachian culture alive. I think it’s important for us to have affordable housing so that we’re able to continue attracting others to come experience what we’ve had our whole lives.”

Davis said she wants the same, but she doesn’t think the Northeast Tennessee is going to see a return to the price points of yesteryear — or even 2018. She said a decade ago the area’s median home price was far below the national average. It’s still below that national average, but much closer to it.

The new prices, she said, are “not an anomaly. This is a market correction and where we need to be. It’s something we’re not used to (but) we’re still not touching the upper echelons of it in any way, shape or form.”

Davis said she’s hoping that whether it’s lower interest rates, higher average wages or more affordable inventory, she’ll be able to hand the keys to a lot more first-time buyers in coming months than she has in the past couple years.

“I love to educate people and help them to grow in their finances or lifestyle in any way,” Davis said.

“The housing market does that, so really, to me, if I can educate a person, a first-time homebuyer, bringing them into a market and showing them how that works and helping them establish that revenue stream, that’s very satisfying.”

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