Charlotte Has Experienced A Homeownership Boom
Charlotte Has 4th Largest Increase in Homeownership Since 2010
The COVID-19 pandemic created divergent fortunes for different parts of the income scale, and housing provides some of the starkest examples. Low-income earners were more likely to lose their jobs or have hours cut back and as a result, relied more on government stimulus measures like direct payments, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums, and mortgage forbearance programs to keep their housing arrangements. Meanwhile, middle and upper-income earners were able to benefit from low-interest rates, strong savings and market returns, and increasingly flexible work policies to seek out new homes. These households’ interest in buying homes led to sky-high demand for residential real estate, with homes quickly being snapped up off the market for record prices. And in Charlotte the homeownership rates have been growing.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau illustrates how rapidly homeownership has risen during the pandemic as a result of this demand. Homeownership began to decline after the collapse of the housing bubble and Great Recession and only began to recover after 2015. Since then, homeownership had slowly been trending upward but saw an especially sharp spike from 2019 to 2020. In that year, the homeownership rate rose two percentage points, from 64.6% to 66.6%, while the raw number of owner-occupied units rose by 4.6 million, to 83.8 million.
To determine the metropolitan areas with the largest increase in homeownership over the past ten years, researchers at Filterbuy calculated the percentage point change in the homeownership rate between 2010 and 2020 using data from the Census Bureau. Researchers also included home price data from Zillow. Only the 70 largest U.S. metropolitan areas with available data from Census were considered in the analysis.
The analysis found that in 2010, the homeownership rate in the Charlotte metro area was 66.1%. Ten years later, that figure surged to 73.3%. Out of the 70 largest U.S. metros, Charlotte experienced the 4th largest increase in homeownership over the past 10 years. Here is a summary of the data for the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC metro area:
- 10-year percentage point change in homeownership: +7.2
- Homeownership rate (2020): 73.3%
- Homeownership rate (2010): 66.1%
- Median home price: $311,157
For reference, here are the statistics for the entire United States:
- 10-year percentage point change in homeownership: -0.3
- Homeownership rate (2020): 66.6%
- Homeownership rate (2010): 66.9%
- Median home price: $303,288
For more information, a detailed methodology, and complete results, you can find the original report on Filterbuy’s website: https://filterbuy.com/resources/cities-with-home-ownership-increase/
