Anaconda Real Estate

Why It Was Cheap - Why It Isn't Now

Anaconda was founded as a mining company town by Marcus Daly, in 1883. The large smokestack you'll see when approaching Anaconda may be the largest free standing masonry structure in the world. It is 585-feet tall and could easily contain the Washington Monument inside it. It is also all that is left of the Anaconda Smelter, which closed in 1981. That event is the key to what happened to Anaconda real estate values.

With half of the jobs in the county lost overnight, people began to leave. The population dropped from over 12,000 to about 9,000 in the following twenty years. As of the 2000 census, one out of six "housing units" in the county was empty. The result? Cheap real estate.

We bought our home in Anaconda in 2002, for $17,500 (see the photo on the page Anaconda Houses), there were dozens of homes that were for sale for less than $50,000. Many were fixer uppers. Others were also outdated inside, since many of the houses in town were built between 1900 and 1930. But there were still some nice ready-to-live-in homes that were really cheap.

It is hard to have any increase in home prices with so many empty homes. Some of the houses we saw when we first moved to town had been for sale for years. If you owned a home and wanted to sell, you had to sell cheap or the buyer would go and buy one of the many other empty houses. During the few months we lived there, we saw the asking price of one home drop from $16,000 to $9,000 - and then sell for $6,000! Another cute home a couple blocks from us was for sale for $10,000.

According to the follow-up census work done in 2004, the population was still declining. But as some left, others were moving into town and the surrounding area, including the parts just over the border into the next county, up by Georgetown Lake. The governor of the state is said to be building a house on the lake, and most homes there are now selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The area is beautiful. In fact, in 2002 Anaconda was the last beautiful area in western Montana that hadn't seen major increases in real estate prices. When we lived there, we noted that an hour in any direction the homes cost three times as much. We always thought that retirees, wealthy people seeking a second home in the mountains, and those who could run their businesses from home (as we do) would eventually move into the area and drive up Anaconda's real estate prices.

Add low interest rates to the mix, and that seems to be what has happened in the last two years or so. One woman we met said she bought a fixer upper for $13,000 just two years ago, in 2005, and when she decided she didn't want to do the work she easily sold the home for $20,000. There are no houses for sale for less than $20,000 at the moment. It appears that the boom times have arrived.

Related page: Anaconda Montana Real Estate - Investing.