Subscribe to TRD Data to unlock this content
Homeowners are staying in their properties the longest in metropolitan areas across the Northeast and Pacific Northwest.
Those areas are also seeing the highest returns when properties eventually sell, signaling that these are high-demand markets where sellers aren’t leaving but buyers want to enter — and are paying a premium to do so.
The Real Deal analyzed third-quarter housing statistics from Attom, a real estate data firm, and found that the highest median seller gains — calculated using the difference between the market’s median sales price and the median price of those homes when previously sold — were in places like Nashua, New Hampshire, and on the West Coast, in Seattle, Washington. These metros, and others in those pockets of the country, also tended to have long average homeownership tenures.
One metro area, in particular, demonstrated both long tenure and outsized seller profit: Northern California’s San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region. Homeowners there are staying in their houses for an average of 12.48 years, the 10th-longest tenure in the country. Meanwhile, sellers who did transact in the third quarter realized a staggering median gain of over 94 percent, the highest in the nation. (Although this is 11 percent lower than the previous year.)
It likely comes as no surprise that this high demand helped the San Jose metro area record the highest median sales price of $1.52 million in the third quarter. This price was nearly 3 percent higher than it was during the same period last year.
Overall, the average U.S. homeownership tenure reached 8.39 years in the third quarter, which was the longest duration recorded in the past 25 years, according to Attom. While many sellers recently put their homes on the market, others may still feel rate-locked, opting to hold on to low borrowing rates secured before they rose. Meanwhile, buyers are steadily gaining more negotiating power in a slowing market, causing deals to take longer to close. In the third quarter, sellers’ profits on the typical sale fell 5.6 percent year over year to 49.9 percent.
Subscribe to TRD Data to unlock this content
Meanwhile, the regions showing shorter ownership tenure and lower seller gains — suggesting lessened demand and potentially weaker returns — are more scattered but appear primarily in Texas. The Provo-Orem, Utah, region, however, has the shortest ownership duration nationally at 6.9 years and the eighth-lowest seller gain percentage, at 3.6 percent.
Texas’ five major metro areas recorded the smallest median seller gains across the entire country in the third quarter: Dallas (33.5 percent), Austin (31.8 percent), Houston (30 percent), El Paso (28.3 percent), and San Antonio (22.8 percent). These same Texas metros also rank well within the bottom third in terms of average ownership duration, with Austin’s being the shortest at 7.27 years — the third-lowest in the country.