Don’t worry — that is the message being preached today by some folks who work in and around these things. Tony Lindauer, the Property Valuation Adminstrator; Chuck Kavanaugh of the Homebuilders Association of Louisville; Adam Hall of the Mortgage Bankers Association; and Lisa Stephenson of the Greater Louisville Realtors Association just held a joint press conference at the HBAL headquarters to release a study of the local real estate market.

Their conclusion:Louisville isn’t nearly as far in the hole as the nation when it comes to housing values. That’s largely because we avoid the wild swings of real estate in some of the bigger cities, where there’s lots of speculative buying.

So while you may not be able to make a lot of money flipping houses here, the group says, “Property owners in Jefferson County can be confident that the investment in their home is still safe. Property values for 2007 in Jefferson County actually increased from a media value of $141,000 in 2006 to $147,000,” according to the report released at the press conference.

The news has been full of horror stories about foreclosures and whatnot, which begins to scare the shit out of the average citizen. That seems to be the driving force behind this effort. Lindauer even invoked the FDR about fear itself and so on.

The graph here shows the annual home price appreciation in Louisville for the last 10 years, by quarter. As you can see, we’re not too high or too low over that period.

We’ll post a link to the report as soon as we can figure out where that is. (CS)