A curated collection of reports, complete with summaries, from across the industry on the subjects you care about.

Trends and policy

Housing wealth gains for the middle class

Source: National Association of Realtors

Report date: March 2022

In its 2022 report, NAR looked at the distribution of housing wealth between 2010 and 2020. NAR identified rising middle-class housing markets as those with the largest increase in the number of middle-class owner-occupied housing.

Highlights

From 2010 to 2020, the top three rising middle-income housing markets were the metropolitan areas of Phoenix, Austin and Nashville.
The top three metropolitan areas that lost middle-income households were New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
As of 2021, a typical single-family existing home purchased 10 years earlier at the median price of $162,600 was likely to have accumulated $229,400 in housing wealth.
Of the $8.2 trillion in housing wealth accumulated from 2010 through 2020, $5.8 trillion (71%) went to high-income homeowners, while $2.1 trillion (26%) went to middle-income homeowners. Just 4% went to low-income homeowners, who were the only group to lose homeowner households.
Since the Great Recession, the homeownership rate has declined across all income groups, with the largest decline in the middle-income rate, from 78.1% to 69.7%.