Securing a home can be difficult in today’s market with high interest rates, high home prices and limited inventory.
The long-term benefits of owning a home are often overwhelming, but the purchase is only part of the struggle – after the purchase, buyers are often faced with a whole new set of challenges that homeowning brings with it.
Accordingly LendingTree Senior Economist Jacob Channel, He analyzed data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to determine which of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are best suited for prospective homeowners. Specifically, LendingTree analyzed the 50 largest cities and weighted them equally in nine different categories:
- Five-year average increase in the value of a home
- Median household income for home ownership
- home ownership rate
- Mean annual home taxes
- Median ratio of housing costs to household income for owner-occupied homes
- Percentage of occupied households with one or fewer occupants per room
- Percentage of inhabited households without complete sanitary facilities
- Percentage of inhabited households without full kitchen equipment
- Percentage of inhabited households without a telephone connection
Overall, the study found that Raleigh, North Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; and St. Louis are the top three metro areas for home ownership. Each of these metros ranks among the lowest for the proportion of homes without full plumbing and kitchen facilities (both are lowest in Raleigh), meaning they appear to have relatively high quality housing. At the same time, homeowners in these areas tend to spend a proportionately smaller portion of their income on their housing expenses than households in other metropolitan areas. This, combined with other factors — such as high homeownership rates in Raleigh and St. Louis and strong five-year average home value growth in Charlotte — is helping these metropolitan areas overcome their deficits.
At the other end of the spectrum, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami are the three largest metropolitan areas with the worst homeownership rates. Aside from high home incomes in Los Angeles and San Francisco and a decent rise in Miami home prices, these metropolitan areas perform poorly in every category we used to create our overall ranking.
Another interesting statistic from the study found that half of the top 10 cities were in the south. In addition to Raleigh and Charlotte, Nashville, Tennessee (fourth), Atlanta (fifth) and Jacksonville, Florida (seventh) also made the top 10. The non-Southern metropolitan areas in the top 10 are in the Midwest and West: St. Louis (third), Minneapolis (sixth), Indianapolis (eighth), and Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City (same ninth).
Click here for a complete overview of the top 50 cities.
