The City Where Home Prices Doubled in Less Than 5 Years

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The City Where Home Prices Doubled in Less Than 5 Years

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A new study of home prices in America’s 100 largest cities found that prices doubled every 10 years on average. This rapid pace may have occurred recently because many people relocated during the COVID-19 pandemic, driving up home prices in some popular markets. In the first seven years of the period, 30-year fixed-price mortgages carried rates of 3% or less, which drove a home-buying frenzy.

Home prices doubled in the past decade in 68 of the nation’s 100 largest cities. In one, Detroit, the doubling took place in less than five years.

Detroit also holds the distinction of having incredibly low home prices. According to Point2homes, “At the start of 2019, you could buy a home in Detroit for $40,000 — yes, really.” Detroit is among the most impoverished cities in the country. It has lost half its population since 1960.

The cities where home prices have doubled fastest fall into one of two categories. They are either poor demographically or have had massive influxes of people that have driven their populations higher recently.

Among the fast-growing cities are Tampa and Miami, where prices have doubled in six years. Prices doubled in 6.2 years in Scottsdale and 6.8 years in Phoenix. (The cheapest and most expensive housing markets in Florida may surprise you.)

Among the poorest cities, Baltimore had the fastest rate of home price growth at 6.1 years, Buffalo at 6.4 years, and Cleveland at 6.9 years.

The city where the doubling took the longest is far from the Continental United States. It took 21.1 years for home prices to double in Anchorage, Alaska.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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.

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