Three years ago, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 created a provision, known as qualified opportunity zones, to rejuvenate economically distressed communities across the US and its territories.

With roughly half of qualified opportunity funds focused on real estate projects and development, a significant group has chased real estate. On the commercial property side (including apartments, office, industrial, and retail), transactions carried a 14% to 20% price premium by capitalizing on tax benefits, according to Real Estate eJournal.

While it is harder to quantify the impact of OZ's on single-family home prices, CoreLogic says they produced an extra 2.2% per year in neighborhood home price appreciation. Researchers at CoreLogic and San Diego State University relied upon extensive public records database on property transactions across the entire US to cull this data. They studied public-record property transactions across all opportunity zones encompassing a six-year period from 2015 through 2020.