Today's article on the state of housing in Phoenixville is a bit deceiving. Joe McArdle states:

Prudential Fox & Roach's McArdle, a fixture of the real estate scene in Phoenixville — and broker for the S & S French Creek Townhomes development and its storied "camp out" five years ago — said the baseline you have to understand is the trend over those five years.

"The average price of a house sold [in the Borough] in March 2004 was $166,288," he said in a recent interview.

"For last year the average price was $209,015, nearly a 125 percent increase since the original camp out."

Those statistics came from TREND, a multiple-listing service and database for some 32,000 realtors in the 13-county Philadelphia metropolitan region.

TREND had more stories to tell. Those accelerating property values in the Borough jumped nearly 26 percent in 2005 alone, and that local increase compared to an increase County-wide of only 6.6 percent. Phoenixville's values increased another 14 percent in 2006, compared to the County's overall four percent.

The influx of new homes may have had a bit to do in the average home price spike since most were valued at double and triple the surrounding neighborhoods. Not that we are not booming, but we kind of inflated ourselves. There is a ton of housing stock in Phoenixville. They a sitting a good long while also. A run through the Sheriff Sale list for last month showed 9 properties were listed for the Borough.

I agree that we may fare a little better than the County trend for this bust but my question for Joe is this: how long does this renaissance last?