DANVILLE — Let’s just say Danville’s real estate market didn’t get the best showing in 2006. It was the year the city received the dubious distinction of having the prior year’s largest drop in median home prices in the nation, a fact that was splashed across cable news and newspapers around the country.

2006 also was the year representatives of the Danville Area Board of Realtors stopped talking to the media or even reporting the area’s statistics to state and national real-estate databases.

“Every time we tried to explain,” said Danville Area Board of Realtors spokeswoman Debbie Borgwald of the flood of media attention, “every time we did an interview, it ended up being a negative — even if it was a positive.”

Borgwald and a host of city officials claimed unfairness in the media’s comparing a small, Midwest post-manufacturing community such as Danville to the likes of metropolitan areas like Chicago, San Francisco and Minneapolis — all of which were included in the 150 cities used in the National Association of Realtors report.

They also argued using Danville’s median price in the rankings — the price at which half the homes are sold above the price and half are sold below it — instead of the average price, reflected more poorly on Danville than metro areas with a higher likelihood of artificially inflated housing values.

Though median price is the most widely accepted tool used by economists to compare regional housing values, Borgwald said average value is a more accurate indicator for a small region like Vermilion County.

“Median price doesn’t always reflect the true picture,” she said. “A lot of people thought the market here was like California or Arizona when the (national) market was dropping out.”

Missed stats

According to the Illinois Association of Realtors spokeswoman Mary Schaefer, the Danville Area Board of Realtors still has not released data for the years of 2006 and 2007.

“They dropped out for a period of time, but they’re back with us now,” she said. “We’re glad they’re back in the program.”

Borgwald confirmed local Realtors started reporting Vermilion County area statistics in January of last year and has kept data current since, but she declined supplying the missing data for 2006-07 for comparison.

“We do have the numbers,” she said, “but we’re not in the business of looking back.”

She summarized local real-estate activity during that time period, saying the national notoriety led to a local sales boon, with outside investors snatching up low-valued residential property in droves. It had little affect on higher-valued residential property, she added.

“The market did skyrocket (during that period),” she reported, “but they were on the lower side. That year was fantastic for our Realtors. They did have record sales. Since then we’ve stabilized and pretty much maintained.”

Listing numbers have remained constant at around 350, and sales during the past two years have been steady. The average price from July of last year to July of this year went up 3.8 percent to $76,000, though the median price between the two years dropped by almost 10 percent to from around $65,000 in 2008 to almost $59,000 so far this year.

Borgwald said total Vermilion County sales were higher than 26 other Illinois counties last year, a feat they hope to build upon.

Another comparable statistic, which Borgwald didn’t mention, is the National Association of Realtors “livability index.” A score below 100 indicates the median-income family would need more than 50 percent of their income to “afford” an entry level home based on housing price and mortgage rates.

Though cities are not ranked individually, the Midwest region is shown to be the most affordable, scoring a 188 in July against the past year’s average of 159 nationally and an index of 158 a year ago. July statistics gave the northeast and west regions the lowest scores, 128 and 135 respectively, with the south region posting 160. The higher the number above 100, the higher percentage a homeowner has available to spend on housing.

The board of Realtors hopes to start a new statistical period that reflects the wildfire changes in the housing market even since 2006. Their belief that other metropolitan areas’ prices were overly inflated turned out to be true, and many of the newspapers who reported Danville’s bad news have gone out of business.

“The forecast is the same everywhere now, and we’ve stabilized” Borgwald said.

There is hope, said incoming board of Realtors president Bill Grubb, of William Grubb Auction and Real Estate. The first-time homebuyer credit program will be extended by the federal government before it expires Nov. 30.

“We’ve had quite a few realtors now who are trying to get the credit together before the deadline,” he said. “It’s still all based on credit, and you still have to have good credit.”

He said lenders were being cautious but that home-loans are still being made. He added, interest rates have remained stable for those with good credit.

The National Association of Realtors is lobbying for the extension and for a provision that would eliminate payback requirements.

“There are lots of good reasons to buy property right now,” he said.

On the street

Danville Mayor Scott Eisenhauer said the city keeps doing what it can to help support the neighborhoods where property values become more about livability than a number on a piece of paper.

It continues a program to target and destroy blight-inducing buildings, he said, and has reaped benefits from a strong neighborhood association that has become the face of the city’s block-to-block cleanup effort.

“We haven’t changed the world, but we’ve made a lot of areas better,” he said. “We know a lot more today about what’s going on in our neighborhoods than we did before.”

He held up as an example the intersection of Main and Buchanan, where a dilapidated brick building was torn down, then replaced with a community garden by one of the Rabbittown associations.

“Things like that are why the decline has stopped,” he said. “I know we still have a lot of work to do. Do we have problems? Yes. But I see a lot of neighbors struggling to keep their home values up. Somewhere along the way we lost that, now you’re starting to see it come back.”

He said Danville also has been lucky in the recent crumbling of the credit markets to not have nearly the foreclosures as other areas in the country.

“It has helped minimize the negative impact other communities have suffered over the same period,” he added.

Commercial land

Vermilion Advantage President and CEO Vicki Haugen said that while sellers may not currently benefit from a commercial market that brings high prices, the area is able to use inexpensive land and facility space as non-cost incentives to lure developers.

“Our land-use costs have always made us very competitive,” she said. “Everyone is looking for a shovel-ready site these days. By the time they’ve evaluated sites they’re within 12-18 months of wanting to start something.

“I think the playing field has really been leveled in real estate,” she added.

Existing commercial real estate, she said, still struggles with the high cost it takes to renovate an old building as compared to building new. Much of the commercial growth during the past 18 months has come from current companies either consolidating other operations to Danville or expanding on existing facilities.

“Just having lots of space doesn’t mean it’s space you can use,” Haugen said.

When dealing with prospects, she said Vermilion Advantage shows them every property the county has to offer in hopes of finding a match.

“You have to put everything in the mix and let them decide what works for them,” she said.

David George, owner of internet-based International Greenhouse Company in Tilton and recently featured in a Commercial-News story on Internet entrepreneurs, said the low cost of commercial property in Vermilion is what’s kept his company here and thriving.

George moved from Seattle to take over the family business, but found plans to move the operation back to Seattle complicated by low property costs and the highly motivated labor pool in the area. The low costs helped him invest more in the move to the Web and the company became an industry leader.

“The business could be located anywhere,” he said following the company’s move to a 6,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex in Tilton last year. “Vermilion County is a good place to have a business. There’s no way we could have afforded this facility (in a larger region).”