This County Has the Most Expensive Homes in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 5, 6:38AM EDT · Published Apr 4, 8:09AM EDT

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This County Has the Most Expensive Homes in America — © Victor J. Blue / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Mortgage rates have risen recently, and so have home prices. This has begun to cause an “affordability” squeeze as people look for new places to live, often outside big cities that have been plagued by the COVID-19 pandemic. One way economists look at how much money people can afford to pay for a house is the percentage of a person’s income in ratio to their monthly home payments. These costs include mortgage, taxes, and insurance.

Real estate research firm ATTOM Data Solutions recently issued its first-quarter 2021 U.S. Home Affordability Report. In it they based their figures “on a median-priced home, assuming an 80 percent down payment and a 28 percent maximum “front-end” debt-to-income ratio.” Income data, based on annualized weekly wages, came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ATTOM looked at 552 counties that had enough data for them to make accurate calculations. Among the things they discovered is that median home prices rose 18% across the country to $278,000 in the first quarter, compared to the same period a year ago. Home prices rose at least 10% in two-third of the country.

Commenting on the trends, Todd Teta, chief product officer with ATTOM Data Solutions, remarked:

“The past year certainly has been an odd one for the U.S. housing market. Home prices surged at a remarkable pace even as the virus pandemic damaged the U.S. economy, which dropped historical affordability levels. But average workers untarnished by the pandemic were still able to afford the typical home because wages and rock-bottom interest rates worked to their favor in a big way.”

Nationwide, the cost of homes purchased in the quarter took up 23.7% of wages, the data on the 552 counties showed.

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The county that required the greatest percentage of wages to buy a home was Kings County, which is the Brooklyn borough of New York City, where the figure was 75.7%. While ATTOM does not draw a relationship between high-income levels and a high percentage of wages needed to buy a home by county, there may be one. Other counties with figures close to Kings County’s are among the most wealthy in the country. These include Marin County, CA (outside San Francisco) (75.5 percent); Santa Cruz County, CA (69.9 percent); Monterey County, CA, (outside San Francisco) (68.1 percent) and Maui County, HI (65.9 percent)

Click here to see which county has the cheapest homes in America.
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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.