New Jersey and Florida account for almost half of the 50 U.S. counties whose housing markets are most vulnerable to the economic effects of the coronavirus, an Attom Data Solutions report said.
Attom ranked 483 counties across the country based on the percentage of housing units receiving a foreclosure notice in the fourth quarter, the number of underwater properties in each county and the percentage of local wages required to pay for major homeownership expenses.
Thirty-six of the top 50 most vulnerable counties had median home prices in the $160,000-to-$300,000 range, the report noted.
Of the 10 most vulnerable counties, six are in New Jersey, including Sussex at No. 1 and Warren at No. 2.
"It looks like the Northeast is more at risk than other areas," Todd Teta, Attom's chief product officer, said in a press release. "As we head into the spring home buying season, the next few months will reveal how severe the impact will be."
Among the New Jersey counties that would be most affected, five are in the New York metropolitan area: Bergen, Essex, Passaic, Middlesex and Union. However, of the four counties in New York that Attom considered to be most vulnerable, only Rockland was in proximity to New York City.
Robert Mazur is the New York Times best-selling author of "The Infiltrator," a memoir about his undercover life, much of which was spent acting as a conduit between ruthless drug barons and corrupt legitimate appearing senior executives that cleaned billions in blood- stained money through otherwise respectable international banks and businesses. For years, in the eyes of organized crime leaders he was a highly successful, mob-connected money launderer who helped manage their illicit fortunes. His clients, some of the most famous and deadly drug cartel bosses, issued a $500,000 contract on his life when arrests were made around the world and he was revealed to be a highly trained U.S. federal undercover agent. After completing a highly decorated 27-year career as a federal agent in three U.S. agencies, Mazur is now the president of KYC Solutions Inc., a firm that provides speaking, expert witness and consulting services to companies worldwide. More information about Mazur, his book and the film based on his life can be found at https://www.robertmazur.com/. The views expressed are his own.
Josh Jones is a manager and client-facing consultant at aspirant Consulting, LLC --- an Atlanta, GA-based consulting firm which specializes in data analytics. With more than a decade of industry experience as a consultant, developer, and team manager; he is proficient in developing solutions that transform data into business-relevant insights. Josh works primary in Tableau, relational databases, and teaching best practices between the two. For more information, please visit, www.aspirent.com. He can be reached at josh.jones@aspirent.com.
Craig Roth is research vice president at Gartner Inc. focused on digital workplace trends, messaging, products, segmentation and best practices. This includes cloud office suites, collaboration tools, content services, and how they are dependent on digital dexterity and digital business trends. He researches how knowledge workers get their jobs done today and how they are likely to get them done in the future (the future of work). He speaks to a wide range of general managers, technology CEOs, product marketing, and product managers, service providers, and IT leaders on how to capture the productivity that new ways of work have to offer.
Mr. Roth is the creator of Gartner's Digital Dexterity Index, a scoring model for showing where workers ready for new ways of working are more likely to be found by country, industry, age grouping, and company size. This index helps vendors prioritize sales and marketing efforts and helps companies and agencies to assess their workforce's openness to changing how they work against benchmarks. He has also engaged in special research projects around Enterprise Attention Management (a response to information overload) and how AI and automation will impact the future of work.
For New York City proper, all five boroughs were in the middle of the list: Staten Island was ranked 161, Queens was 271, Manhattan at 312, Brooklyn at 320 and the Bronx was 327.
Most of the Florida counties considered at risk are in the northern and central portions of the state. But Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, is also on that list.
There were four counties in the metro Chicago area on the list were Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will in Illinois. Cook County, which includes Chicago proper, is ranked 53rd most vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the only California county on the 50 most vulnerable list is Shasta. Los Angeles County was No. 276. The Bay Area counties were also in the bottom half of the list.
At the other end of the spectrum, 10 of the counties where the housing market is least vulnerable to the coronavirus are in Texas. Seven are in Wisconsin and there are five in Colorado.
King County in Washington, where Seattle is located, was the 20th least vulnerable county according to Attom.
