The Most Popular House in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 22, 9:30AM EST

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The Most Popular House in America — © davidwilson1949 / Flickr

Demand for homes increased in the past two years due to the ability of Americans to move over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. This led some people to relocate to their dream cities because they could work from home. When mortgage rates were low, this migration was made easier. The most popular homes are not where people live at all. The single most popular home in America is located in Celina, Ohio, a place so small in population that it can barely be called a city.
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Realtor.com makes a list of the most popular homes in America each year. The number of searches on the website was how the list got decided.
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The Celina, Ohio, house was popular because there was a jail adjacent to the kitchen. Otherwise, the house was fairly average. It went on the market in June for $275,000. It sold in August for $315,000. This matches a pattern established during the peaks of the home-buying frenzy. Some houses sold for above the asking price. The price of this home was about $75,000 below the median homes sold in the first half of 2022.
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The Celina house has some other attractive benefits. It has an indoor pool. It also has four bedrooms, two kitchens and a full bar. The house is huge by the standards of homes sold this year. It covers 6,467 square feet, which is more than double the size of homes sold in the first half. Realtor.com makes the point that some of the house needs to be updated.
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Why is the home so inexpensive? Probably because it is in Celina. The city is in the middle of nowhere. It sits in western Ohio near the Indiana border. The closest city is Dayton, which is to the south. Celina has a population of just below 11,000, according to the Census Bureau. That is almost identical to the 2010 figure. A total of 8.8% of the people live in poverty, which is less than the national figure. The median income is about $53,000, below the national figure.

While the house may be popular because it is idiosyncratic, it is in a city where few people want to live.

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.