Homes Earned More for Owners Than Their Jobs Last Year

An increase in the value of a typical U.S. home exceeded the median worker income for the first time, Zillow says.

Home values surged last year as low mortgage-interest rates helped stoke buyer demand.

As per Wall Street Journal: “In this booming housing market, many homeowners earned more last year from home appreciation than from their jobs.

Zillow Group Inc.’s home value index, which estimates the value of the typical U.S. home, rose 19.6% in 2021 to $321,634, an increase of $52,667 from 2020. That figure was slightly higher than what the median U.S. full-time worker earned, which was about $50,000 last year before taxes, according to Census Bureau data cited by Zillow.

That marked the first time that the annual nationwide dollar growth for the typical home value exceeded the inflation-adjusted median pretax income, according to a Zillow analysis, which goes back to 2000.”

The Journal says, “The surge in home prices last year has been a boon to homeowners but has made it more difficult for first-time homebuyers to enter the housing market. Collectively, U.S. homeowners with mortgages gained more than $3.2 trillion in equity in 2021 compared with a year earlier, according to housing-data provider CoreLogic.”

To conclude, the Journal says “The housing market has remained competitive this year. The inventory of homes for sale fell to a record low in January of this year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The median listing price rose to an all-time high of $392,000 in February, according to Realtor.com.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal