The City Where Home Ownership Fell Most During Pandemic

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 20, 8:51AM EDT

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The City Where Home Ownership Fell Most During Pandemic — © j26 / Flickr

Home sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Most of this is due to relocation triggered by the spread of COVID-19 across big, expensive cities. People have moved to places that allow them to work remotely with a better quality of life. Sales have also been boosted by low mortgage rates. Among the effects of this migration, homeownership rates have risen in some cities and fallen off in others.

The home sales rush has been a double-edged sword. Rising prices have made some homes unaffordable compared to a year ago. And, inventories have crashed as available homes have been snapped up quickly. These issues have put living in some cities out of reach for buyers who might have relocated to them not long ago. The new building of homes has been slowed by a sharp rise in essential building materials like lumber.

Realtor.com studied the rise and fall homeownership in the 75 largest metros using Census Bureau data. Their researchers looked at homeownership rates in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 and compared them with the same quarter the year before. Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale commented:

“Some markets like Albany, Sacramento, and Buffalo clearly benefited from an influx of people leaving big cities like New York and San Francisco, but many other markets are just good places to live that benefited from increased homebuyer motivation thanks to low mortgage interest rates and a lot of time spent at home over the last year.”

On the other hand, in some cities outside investors bought homes and turned them into rentals, and home prices in other markers soared beyond affordability. Homeownership in some of these cities fell.

The city where homeownership fell the most over the measured period was Syracuse, where the drop was 8.6%. Reator.com experts explained:

Like just about everywhere else in the country, Syracuse has more potential buyers than it does homes for sale. That’s one main reason homeownership is falling. The market is so hectic that buyers offering 20% over asking price to outbid one another are commonplace.

Syracuse, however, does remain affordable. The median price of a home is $220,000, at least $100,000 below the national figure.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.