The frustrating affordability paradox

The median rate for a standard US home in June was $445,000, Realtor.com reported last month, which was in line with the prior year. While property prices are no longer surging, they’re still elevated, as are mortgage rates. That has made home affordability a major, long-standing issue.

Many would-be buyers are priced out of the housing market, as households making less than $100,000 per year couldn’t afford a typical home in over two thirds of the 50 biggest US cities, according to the WSJ/Realtor.com study.

Stubbornly high prices have hurt home sales, as the National Association of Realtors confirmed recently that property transactions fell 5.4% in June from 2023.

Softer demand hasn’t taken down listing prices since supply remains constrained. The WSJ/Realtor.com study showed that home inventory is about 32% lower than before the pandemic — a rate that rises to nearly 52% for the 20 top-ranked cities in the report.

“Limited inventory drove competition higher, which put upward pressure on prices across the country,” wrote Realtor.com‘s Hannah Jones and Danielle Hale, who authored the report. “In-demand, affordable markets, such as those on the Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking list, have seen prices climb, especially high relative to pre-pandemic prices.”

To that point, the economic researchers noted that houses in their top-20 markets cost 45% more than in 2019, versus a still-astronomical 39% jump for the US broadly. Homes in those standout cities also cost 6% more than last year, while the rest of the US had flat home prices.

Therein lies the paradox of affordability: Buyers looking for reasonably priced homes flock to cheap markets, and that demand surge pushes property prices up, making them less affordable.

“Relatively low-priced metros have thrived relative to higher-priced areas over the last couple of years as buyers sought out affordable areas that offered appealing lifestyle amenities,” Jones and Hale wrote. “The popularity of these approachable markets, however, has pushed prices higher, hurting their affordability somewhat.”

Home supply is becoming less of an issue in the study’s top markets, as inventory in each was higher than the year before, though only 35% saw supply rise at an above-average rate.

Still, affordable homes in desirable markets are getting snapped up quickly, as they were only listed for a month on average, which is less than two weeks less than the national average.

16 markets with affordable homes and plenty of jobs

Besides obvious factors like price, those in the market for a house should certainly consider the job market that they’d be entering into, unless they always work remotely.

Business Insider found that there are dozens of cities that have a lower median home price than the national average of $445,000 and an unemployment rate below the current mark of 4.1%. The data set used in this analysis is the same used in the WSJ/Realtor.com report, which was the 200 most populated metropolitan areas, according to the latest US Census Bureau data.

Within that group, there were 16 real-estate markets where homes were at least $150,000 less than the national average that also had an unemployment rate at or below 4%. Below are those cities along with each market’s median home price in June, the savings compared to the national average, the unemployment rate, and the difference versus the US jobless rate.