Philadelphia Housing Market: “Lagging” or “Next Hot Spot”?

When it comes to the housing recovery, it’s like reading studies on how wine or coffee will affect your health: there’s new information every day, much of which conflicts with the old. A few days ago, RealtyTrac released its Housing Market Recovery Special Report, which showed that the Philadelphia metro area was one of the “bottom 20 markets lagging the [sic] real estate recovery.” In fact, it was in the bottom five, along with the Allentown metro area. Go team!

But then, on the other hand, just a few days before that, CNBC.com did an article about the next “hot spots,” and Philadelphia–indeed, all of Pennsylvania–made the cut, as can be seen in the following map that CNBC helpfully put together:

Screen shot of the graphic created by CNBC.com.