- In April, the national median list price for a home was about $431,250, a Realtor.com analysis revealed. So to comfortably afford a typical home, a household needs to earn about $114,000 a year. But after years of wild home price appreciation, there’s been a slowdown.
The pandemic changed the housing world. Americans need to earn about 70% more today than six years ago to comfortably afford a median-priced home, a Realtor.com monthly analysis published Thursday revealed.
In April, the national median list price for a home was around $431,250—an almost 37% increase since April 2019, before the pandemic. To comfortably afford a typical home, a household needs to earn about $114,000 a year. That’s a $47,000, or 70.1%, leap compared to 2019. But real median household income in the United States is only $80,610, per the latest government data.
That figure assumes a 30-year fixed mortgage, a 20% down payment, and no more than 30% of gross income spent on housing. (The median down payment is 18% among all homebuyers and 9% for first-time buyers; and any more than 30% of income spent on housing would fall under the cost-burdened definition.) Nonetheless, a person, or household, would need to make about $9,500 a month before taxes to cover the mortgage, property taxes, and insurance, the Realtor.com analysis shows.
Necessary earnings vary geographically: In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for example, the income needed to comfortably afford a typical home—priced at $1,195,000—is $315,892, an 86% increase in six years.
Home prices soared throughout the pandemic because people could work from anywhere and wanted more space. Then mortgage rates skyrocketed from their pandemic-era rock bottoms of sub-3% once the Federal Reserve entered a tightening cycle to tame scorching-hot inflation. The two are still very high, relatively speaking. But home price appreciation has slowed, and some economists predict they could fall this year—and mortgage rates have come down from a two-decade high of 8%, to 6.81%. So, there is something of a silver lining.
“Even with today’s affordability hurdles, meaningful changes in the market could give buyers a better shot at finding a home,” Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale said in a statement. The number of homes for sale is rising in many markets, she said, “giving shoppers more choices than they’ve had in years.”
Plus, sellers are becoming more flexible on pricing, she said, so “while higher mortgage rates are certainly weighing on demand, the silver lining is that the market is starting to rebalance.”
But the housing market is at a standstill, as it has been for a couple of years, because not many people are buying or selling. Fewer people are buying homes, because they cannot afford them—and homeowners who either secured a low mortgage rate during the pandemic or are mortgage-free aren’t selling. Although, that appears to be changing.
The number of actively listed homes rose 30.6% compared to the same time last year. For the first time, the number of homes for sale in April surpassed April 2020 levels—a pandemic benchmark, per the Realtor.com analysis. But active inventory is still below typical pre-pandemic levels. Still, more sellers are coming back to market than buyers, and they’re slashing prices to sell. In April, 18% of listings had price reductions, a 2.5% increase compared to a year ago.
