People in This Housing Market Made Over 100% on Their Homes

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 29, 7:30AM EDT

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People in This Housing Market Made Over 100% on Their Homes — © picmax / iStock via Getty Images

The housing market is in an astonishing state. The widely followed S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index showed that home prices rose over 16% in May, compared to the same month last year. In Phoenix, they were up over 20%, and in some smaller towns and cities, the figure is much higher.

The rise in prices has been triggered by a surge in demand as people leave large east and west coast cities for places with what many people think is a better quality of life and lower living expenses. Working from home, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, has made this a widely adopted way to have a job without going to a corporate office. As demand has surged, supply has fallen. Builders have not been able to keep up. Those they have tried to have found that some essential building materials, like lumber, have jumped sharply in price.

Real estate property database company ATTOM has just released its second-quarter 2021 U.S. Home Sales Report. It shows the profits made by people who sold homes during the period. Nationwide, sellers made 44.9%, compared to what they paid for their homes. Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM, characterized the current environment as a “housing market in high gear.”

ATTOM looked at 195 U.S. metropolitan areas. “Metro areas were included if they had at least 1,000 single-family home sales in the second quarter of 2021 and a population of at least 200,000.” In the second quarter, compared to the same quarter last year, the metro with the largest increase in profit for a sale over what the homeowner originally paid was Boise, Idaho, where the number was 123.4%.
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The analysis does not provide a reason why Boise’s number was so high. One reason may be that it is a favorite place to move to for people who lived in large west coast cities. Another is simply the growth of the population overall. According to the Census Bureau, Boise had among the largest increases in population from 2010 to 2020, with a 24.94% gain to 770,353. That made it the 77th largest metro in the nation.

Click here to read about the most expensive cities in which to buy a home.
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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.