Union County

Union County, New Mexico sits at a median home price of $121,117, which is one of the lowest entry points you'll find anywhere in the state. The county scored a perfect 100 on affordability and lands at the 17th national percentile overall, ranking 21st out of 30 New Mexico counties. Home prices declined 10.2% year-over-year, which either signals distress or a mean reversion in a thin market, and in a county of 4,074 people, individual transaction volume is so low that a handful of sales can move the median dramatically in either direction. The cash flow and cap rate figures are zeroed out in the underlying data, meaning reliable rent comparables are insufficient to generate a meaningful estimate. That gap alone tells you something: this is a market where you are flying without instruments on the income side.

For the serious investor trying to slot Union County into a strategy, the data does not support a cash-flow thesis in any conventional sense. The cash flow score is literally zero, and without a defensible rent estimate, you cannot underwrite a yield with confidence. The appreciation score of 5 out of 100, combined with a 10.2% price decline over the past year, rules out a pure appreciation play as well. The only rational framing here is deep value or opportunistic, meaning an investor who already has local knowledge, an existing tenant relationship, or a specific operational use case for rural northeastern New Mexico. The $121,117 median price is genuinely low in absolute terms, and an affordability index of 100 confirms it, but low price is not the same as value if you cannot source tenants or establish a rent basis.

The taxInsurance data provides a cleaner picture of carry costs than the income side does. At the state-average effective property tax rate of 0.80%, Union County falls within normal range, so the tax line is not going to blow up an underwrite the way it would in a high-rate state. Combined with the insurance estimate, you are looking at $111 per month in tax and insurance on a $121,117 asset. That is manageable, and at these price levels even a modest rent would cover those two line items. The caveat that matters: this is a state-average estimate from Tax Foundation 2024 data, and actual county and township rates in New Mexico can diverge from that figure, so pull the county assessor's current millage rate before you finalize any numbers.

The economic context here is the core risk. A population of 4,074 makes Union County one of the smallest markets in the state. There are no economic anchor employers or economy notes provided in the data, which is itself informative. Rural northeastern New Mexico has historically depended on ranching, oil and gas at the margins, and limited government employment. When a market this small experiences a 10.2% price decline in a single year with no listed economic anchors to explain demand, that is a concentration and demographic risk worth taking seriously. Any landlord here is effectively dependent on a very narrow tenant pool, and a single employer reduction or population outflow can meaningfully alter vacancy. The data does not provide vacancy figures, so that risk cannot be quantified here, but the population base makes it structurally real.

Compared to the neighboring counties in this dataset, Union County is the cheapest by a wide margin. Hidalgo County comes in lower at $87,347 with an overall score of 45, two points below Union's 47. Colfax County at $240,853, Taos County at $427,888, and Grant County at $188,064 are all meaningfully more expensive. Grant County is the one neighbor with both a rent estimate and a price-to-rent ratio in the data: a median rent of $1,100 against a $188,064 median price produces a gross rent-to-price ratio of roughly 7.0%, which is a usable starting point for underwriting even if cap rate math still requires expense assumptions. Taos carries a 6.1% gross ratio at $427,888. Union County does not have comparable rent data, which makes Grant County a more underwritable market right now even at a higher price point. An investor should choose Union over its neighbors only if the purchase price creates a margin of safety large enough to absorb the income uncertainty, or if they have a specific off-market deal with known tenants in place. For anyone relying on market-rate data to underwrite a rental, Grant County gives you more to work with at a still-affordable price level.