This Is the City With the Most Expensive Homes in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 14, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is the City With the Most Expensive Homes in America — © Sundry Photography / iStock via Getty Images

Home prices in America have soared over the past two years. The carefully followed S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index showed that home prices rose 20.6% nationwide in March, the fastest pace since the index was created. In some cities, the rise was closer to 30%.

What has happened to drive these increases? Among other things, mortgage rates that were below 3% for a 30-fixed rate loan. Those days are over though, as mortgage rates now have surged to above 5%.

Americans became more mobile because the pandemic offered more opportunity to work from home. Many left expensive coastal cities for less expensive cities inland. Real estate prices in cities like New York and San Francisco can be more than twice the national average.

To determine the city with the most expensive homes, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from Realtor.com’s Monthly Housing Trends Report. In the report, the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States were ranked based on the median home listing price in May 2022.
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Home prices have continued to increase nationwide, even as demand has cooled in the wake of higher prices and mortgage rates. Demand for homes is still high coming off the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, but such high list prices may be dissuading some potential buyers from entering the market, while higher interest rates are pushing some buyers out of the market.

Many of the places with the most expensive homes are also among the largest metro areas in the country. These population centers offer access to high-paying jobs, good schools and entertainment and dining options, making them attractive places to live and driving up home costs.

The metropolitan area with the most expensive homes is San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California. Here are the details:

Median list price, May 2022: $1,494,000
Annual increase in median list price: +15.1% (22nd highest)
Median days on market: 17 (eighth fewest)
Population: 1,985,926

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Click here to see all the cities with the most expensive homes in America.

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.