Columbus Ranks 3rd !

Columbus is ranked 3rd behind Seattle and Pittsburgh by Forbes to have the most stable real estate market into 2008.
From the Forbes Magazine article:
Forbes ranked the country's 10 most stable markets. All are projected to have median home sale price increases next year, thanks to a combination of factors including lower-than-average inventory levels, little price volatility and high job growth. To arrive at our list, we teamed with Moody's Economy.com to develop three prediction models based on a range of factors that affect how prices move. These include, among other things, the state of local economies, new construction contracts, foreclosure rates, local credit markets, sales rates, affordability and inventory. Each of America's 40 biggest cities was ranked on all three models, with price appreciation counting one half and sales rates and credit models accounting for the other
half. Data were drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau, National Association of Realtors, Equifax, a
credit-market tracking firm and Moody's Economy.com.
Behind The Numbers
The first model looks at projected median existing home price growth from fourth-quarter 2007 to fourthquarter 2008. Factors influencing this data include the market's inventory of unsold homes and the amount of new construction underway, both of which have obvious effects on supply. Housing affordability and local construction costs also play a role, acting as indicators of the market's ability to accommodate first-time buyers and new construction. Next is job growth, which attracts people to the area and increases their ability to buy a home. Expensive markets like Seattle and San Francisco, which have low housing inventories and low construction
costs, do well by this measure. Most of the top performers, however, are affordable, high-job growth markets like Dallas and San Antonio. "It largely reflects that these markets never went through the boom and aren't going through the severe bust," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "Price growth is not great, but [these markets] are not having house price declines. [All markets] are experiencing pricing problems, but in these markets it's less of a problem." Moody's second predictive model examined market activity by calculating sales rate, which measures how quickly unsold inventory is expected to sell, and turnover, which measures how much of the overall housing stock those sales represent. For example, the projected volume of home sales in San Francisco for the coming year represents a low 1.1% of the market's overall housing stock. In a market like Los Angeles, hamstrung by foreclosures and inventory glut, a 1% to 2% sales rate is potentially devastating--but given San Francisco's supply-side fundamentals and low foreclosure rates, prices are expected to modestly climb.