American households own $28.4 trillion of residential real estate, but that wealth is largely concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan markets, according to the mortgage and loan exchange platform LendingTree’s latest analysis.
LendingTree examined the value of 155 million U.S. properties listed in its database and found, unsurprisingly, that New York City has the highest total value of residential real estate properties, with a combined $2.6 trillion in value, which is equal to France’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017. Los Angeles and San Francisco rounded out the top three with $2.2 billion and $1.2 billion worth of residential real estate, respectively.
These coastal hubs are the only cities to clock in values in the trillions — the rest of the cities on the list had residential real estate values ranging from $813 billion (Chicago) to $83 billion (Naples, Fla.). Beckley, W. Va. had the lowest valuation, coming in at $189 million.
Methodology
To determine the total value of cities, LendingTree looked at home value figures pulled on June 26, 2018 from the My LendingTree property value database. The database includes estimated home values for more than 155 million properties in the U.S. based on public tax, deed, mortgage and foreclosure data, as well as proprietary local data used to power home financing recommendations for My LendingTree users. The total value of real estate in metropolitan areas in the database was $26.2 trillion, close to the Federal Reserve’s estimate of total residential real estate value of $28.4 trillion. GDP data was taken from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook published in April 2018.