Despite the depth and breadth of housing data from the Northeast Tennessee Association of Realtors (NETAR) and CoreData a local cohort is waiting for the bottom to fall out of the local housing market, sending prices tumbling.

If there’s a dramatic, unforeseen circumstance, that’s possible. But the odds are better that the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee will gather around a post presidential election bonfire next week, road marshmallows, and sing “Kumbaya.”

A third-part analysis that backs up the local market’s resilience is ATTOM’s Special Housing Risk Report. ATTOM is a leading curator of land, property data, and real estate analytics. The report is a county-level analysis of mortgaged properties that are more or less vulnerable to declines, based on home affordability, underwater mortgages, and other measures.

The local focus was on the Washington and Sullivan TN county. Both are among the nation’s least vulnerable markets.

The report shows that California, New Jersey, and Illinois had the highest concentrations of the most-at-risk markets in the country.

At the other end of the risk spectrum, close to half the markets considered least likely to decline fell in Virginia, Wisconsin and Tennessee. Blount and Knox counties were Tennessee’s least vulnerable markets with ranking of 581 and 580.

Sullivan Co.  was ranked 526 out of 589 counties. Washington Co. ranking of 458. Counties with the lowest composite rank were considered most vulnerable to housing market problems. Those with the highest composite rank were considered least vulnerable.

 Counties were considered more or less at risk based on the percentage of homes facing possible foreclosure, the portion with mortgage balances that exceeded estimated property values, the percentage of average local wages required to pay for major home ownership expenses on median-priced single-family homes and local unemployment rates.  Rankings were based on a combination of those four categories in 589 counties with sufficient data to analyze, according to ATTOM.

Another ATTOM report that illustrates the stability of the local market is equity analysis. It shows that well over half of the local mortgage properties are equity rich. The regional equity rich number is 60.2%. The US average is 48.3%. More about that analysis later.