24/7 Wall St. Insights
- The carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller index, which covers housing prices each month, showed that these rose to an all-time high in June.
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The carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller index, which covers housing prices each month, showed that these rose to an all-time high in June. The housing market remains tight. People with 3% mortgages do not want to give their homes up. People who face 7% mortgages often cannot afford a new home and need to rent.
Another measure of home prices, which includes the top 50 metros by population, is one from Realtor.com. Based on their research, the median prices of a home for sale in the United States in August was $429,990. That is up by 36.2% from August 2019.
There is an extreme wide dollar difference in terms of home prices between markets where incomes are low compared to those with the highest incomes in the nation. At the bottom of the list is an old industry city. The median price for homes for sale in Cleveland is $269,000. Very close to that bottom are Detroit and Buffalo at $279,900. All three are located across the belt around Lake Erie where the car industry dominated the economies in the middle of the last century. Poverty rates in these cities have risen as populations have dropped.
The city with the highest median price of homes for sale is in the middle of the area where the tech industry is the dominant employer. In San Jose, the figure is 1,399,000. The only other city above $1 million is Los Angeles at $1,190,000.
The numbers show just how much the job market influences what people pay for homes.
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