Perth has the highest-ever number of suburbs in the million-dollar club, after prices in 15 new suburbs recently exceeded the milestone median.
Research from CoreLogic shows there were 56 suburbs in Perth with median house prices above $1 million in May this year, compared to 41 a year previously.
Adding to fears about the affordability of Perth property, the new research shows in the year to May, 13 per cent of sales recorded a price of at least $1 million.

CoreLogic research analyst Kaytlin Ezzy said the suburban median in the million-dollar-club is almost twice Perth’s overall house median of $555,538, following a 5.6 per cent price rise across the metropolitan area in the year to May.
The new million dollar suburbs appear to be popular for many of the same reasons as those that lead the pack — close proximity to water, big blocks, good schools and proximity to the city.
Suburbs close to either the beach or the river include Fremantle, South Fremantle, Hillarys, Karrinyup, Iluka, Como, Alfred Cove, Shelley and Burns Beach.

Good schools and proximity to the city are likely to underpin the popularity of some of the inner-city suburbs on the list, including Gwelup — which increased from $859,5549 a year previously — as well as Inglewood, and Mount Hawthorn.
Como specialist for The Agency, Vanessa Naso, said her patch enjoyed the benefit of a riverside and central location as well as big blocks and good schools.
Nine of Perth’s top 10 most expensive house markets were located in the city’s inner region, with Dalkeith recording the highest median value at $2.96 million.
It eclipsed Peppermint Grove, were the median is $2,824,616, and Cottesloe ($2,689,912)
Yallingup houses in the picturesque south west town remain the west’s only regional market to make the million-dollar list with a current median value of $1,620,473
The research found that nationally, 1,367 or 30.4 per cent of house and unit markets analysed in May recorded a median value of $1 million or more.
“High consumer sentiment, tight advertised supply, and low interest rates fuelled strong home value growth throughout 2021, resulting in a new record high annual growth rate of 22.4 per cent nationally over the 12 months to January,” Ms Ezzy said.
When Nick Slater started selling houses in King Creek on the NSW Mid North Coast a decade ago, a seven-figure price tag was “unthinkable”.
Key points:
- CoreLogic report finds median house prices in nine Mid North Coast suburbs have risen above a million dollars for the first time
- Regional Development Australia Mid North Coast chief executive Kerry Grace says unattainable house prices are exacerbating a homelessness crisis
- Regional housing markets showing stronger growth compared to capital city markets
Now, he says, it is the new norm.
“Around five years ago in the King Creek market, we would have seen the first property exceed a million dollars,” Mr Slater said.
“Then gradually, we started seeing the first properties sell for over two million.
The semi-rural area saw the median value of homes sold jump by $425,000 in the year to May, according to the latest data from CoreLogic.
King Creek is one of 170 regional house or unit markets across the nation to record a median value at or above $1 million for the first time.
The total number in regional areas is now 270.
It is a common trend in the area, with eight other Mid North Coast suburbs also joining the million-dollar median club: Sapphire Beach, Moonee Beach, Korora, Bellingen, Bonny Hills, Lake Cathie, Emerald Beach and Bonville.

Mr Slater said the rise was likely due to the shifting buyer demographic, with the area’s “acreage lifestyle” in a hinterland location near a coastal regional centre attracting Sydney’s retirees.
“The proportion of city buyers has increased immensely,” he said.
He said younger families were priced out of the area.
“These large homes on acreages are absolutely perfect for families,” Mr Slater said.
“However, over recent years, as prices have grown substantially, the market has become disproportionately skewed towards semi-retired and retired couples.”

Housing affordability crisis deepens
As house prices rise, the issue of affordability continues to plague many prospective buyers.
Regional Development Australia Mid North Coast (RDAMNC) chief executive Kerry Grace said unattainable house prices were exacerbating a homelessness crisis and an essential worker shortage in regional areas.

“There’s just such a lack of availability of housing in the market whether that’s the dire shortage of rentals or the amount of houses that are actually affordable for people to buy,” Ms Grace said.
RDAMNC’s survey of key workers across industries including healthcare, aged care, childcare, hospitality and agriculture showed many had been looking to buy property in the region but found it impossible in the face of low availability and skyrocketing prices.
“We’re hearing some harrowing stories of people who can’t find rentals or get into the property market,” Ms Grace said.
Ms Grace said the organisation’s research on the housing affordability crisis revealed not only a shortage of available accommodation but a problem of empty spaces in large homes.
Byron Bay continues to be popular
The Byron and Tweed region of NSW took out four of the top five median values in regional NSW.
Byron Bay houses topped the list with a median value of $2,741,847, up approximately $400,000 from this time last year.
Casuarina, Myocum and Suffolk Park also made the top five, with medians of above $2 million. Burradoo in the Southern Highlands had the fourth-highest median at $2,416,897.
The majority of the new regional million-dollar markets are concentrated in the regions Southern Highlands and Shoalhaven,18, Illawarra,16, and Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, 23 regions.
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Years ago, my wife and I moved out of Salt Lake City so I could take a job in Los Angeles. It proved to be a lot of fun. We could see the Hollywood sign from our house. The smell of Thai restaurants wafted over our neighborhood. The neon lights from the taco trucks flickered all night.
But a few years later our California sojourn came to an end when we had our first kid. Suddenly, we needed less nightlife and more space. By the time our daughter was 5 months old, we were in the process of moving back to Salt Lake — where we remain to this day.
A lot of factors informed our decision. Probably the biggest was that the cost of living, especially housing, was far lower than in California. On top of that, our family had gradually converged on Salt Lake over the years, again in large part due to the area’s affordability compared to other parts of the country. And what we learned from this experience was that housing and families are deeply linked. You can’t talk about one without considering the other.
That’s always been true, but it’s an especially pressing point right now for two reasons. First, the cost of housing is bonkers, particularly now (ironically) in cities like Salt Lake and Boise which boomed during the coronavirus pandemic. And second, family sizes are on the decline as Americans have fewer and fewer kids.
Over time, these two realities are going to crash headlong into each other. They’ll influence the types of houses people want, the neighborhoods that win the most attention, and the cities that end up thriving. In the best-case scenario, all of this could produce a future in which home buyers have an easier time climbing onto the real estate ladder. But there’s also a dimmer possibility in which a shrinking population crumbles the housing market as we know it.
To understand what’s going on, it’s worth noting that the U.S. birthrate has been falling for years. The current decline began after the Great Recession, and according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the number of births in 2020 is the lowest since 1980.”

The trend toward falling birthrates has become even more pronounced lately, with the Brookings Institute noting that the coronavirus pandemic appears to have led to 60,000 “missing” births that would otherwise have been expected during the first year of the crisis.
Some parts of the U.S., such as Utah, have managed to outperform the rest of the country when it comes to births. But even those regions have seen their rates gradually dip over the years.
One consequence of this trend is smaller households. Pew Research Center has charted the data going all the way back to the late 1700s and found that American households have been steadily shrinking for centuries, which the researchers attribute in part to people having fewer babies.
So far at least, this trend hasn’t had much of an impact on housing. As anyone who has tried to buy a home recently has discovered, prices feel like they’re out of control. And they kind of are, with data showing an unprecedented spike in prices at the beginning of 2020.

Unsurprisingly, this spike in prices has made housing less affordable, and the problem is especially bad right now in Western states. Data from Redfin, for example, shows that in May, more than 61% of homes in Utah sold above their list prices. Redfin put seven Utah cities including Roy, Taylorsville and Murray in its “most competitive” market category, meaning homes in those areas usually go under contract in just six days, have their contingencies waived and sell above their asking prices.
Snyderville, near Park City, saw home prices rise an astonishing 124.9% in May compared to last year. Overall for the state, prices in Utah were up more than 25% last month compared to May 2021.
By comparison, Redfin’s data shows that overall in the U.S., home prices were up in May by more than 14%. That’s a significant jump, but also far less than what happened in Utah, or in neighboring Arizona, where prices were up more than 22% last month.
Housing and families are deeply linked. You can’t talk about one without considering the other.
All of which is to say — you aren’t imagining it. Finding and affording a house really did get a lot harder recently. As they say on Reddit, housing went to the moon.
So what does all of this mean?
In the short term, changing family dynamics and rising housing costs may reshape the types of homes people want to buy. For instance, Pew has found that more and more people are living in multigenerational households. And that in turn is fueling demand for properties with basement apartments or backyard cottages. These kinds of properties make it easier for young families to live with, say, aging parents. And they let a larger group of family members pool their money to start climbing the real estate ladder.
Whether the multigenerational trend sticks around is hard to say. But over time the impact of declining birthrates could have even more profound consequences. For example, if declining birthrates eventually led to a shrinking population, it could gradually reduce the demand for housing. In the best-case scenario, this might mean cheaper housing; prices are high right now because demand is high and supply is low. Reduce demand and you’ll have an easier time buying a house.
But a shrinking population doesn’t necessarily lead to an affordable housing utopia. Just ask Detroit.
At one point Motor City was the fourth largest metropolis in the U.S. Then its population spent decades in free-fall. Home prices in Detroit are low in response to this decline, but so are wages. As a result, Detroit’s homeownership rate has been falling, not rising, and more than half of the city’s renters are overburdened by their rent. Detroit’s shrinking population has not been a boon to its real estate market.
Finding and affording a house really did get a lot harder recently.
This process has been replicated all over the U.S. Several years ago, my job involved crisscrossing the country on various reporting assignments. I met a lot of inspiring people on these trips, but I also saw a lot of dusty old “For sale” signs and boarded-up windows in the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania coal country. While a shrinking population does reduce home prices, it also stings the broader economy as well.
It’s unlikely this type of bust is coming for fast-growing Western states. But it is possible to imagine slower growth being harder on some neighborhoods than others. Urban planning experts such as Charles Marohn have written about how suburban development requires constant growth in order to stay financially solvent. If this type of expansionist development becomes unprofitable, though, aging suburbs are going to face hard choices about how to fund things like street repairs. In this scenario, farther-flung areas might suffer the most from a slower-growing population, even as more centrally located neighborhoods with bigger tax bases and shorter commutes pull ahead.
It’s impossible to say what will happen in the years and decades to come. In 1950, no one could have imagined Detroit as it exists today. In 1900, few would have guessed that Los Angeles would eventually rise to become America’s second city. And overseas, countries such as Japan and Germany are dealing with significant challenges related to aging and shrinking populations, but have also not experienced financial ruin along the way.
The good news here is that there’s still plenty of time to deal with these issues. In fast-growing places such as Utah, Idaho and Texas, for instance, part of the solution is more family-oriented housing in centrally located neighborhoods, rather than just out on the distant peripheries. It also means adapting building regulations to allow, or encourage, multigenerational households. For example, Salt Lake, like many cities, has an ordinance on the books that lets homeowners add mother-in-law apartments to their properties. But few people have actually built anything. Cities that are serious about thriving as family dynamics evolve need to figure out ways to clear the red tape so that housing can evolve as well.
At the same time, families themselves need support. Part of the reason birthrates are falling is because in the U.S., it’s really hard and expensive to have kids right now. Parents struggle with expensive or inaccessible child care, a lack of paid leave, and lately, a shortage of critical supplies such as formula. These are complicated issues, but making sure that a region — and a region’s housing market — are healthy over the long term means making sure people can afford to have kids.
In any case, the relationship between families and housing is a deep one. And when one of those things changes it inevitably impacts the other. My hope, then, is that places that are currently thriving — including Salt Lake, where I currently live — manage over the long term to thread the needle through both housing and population growth.
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Copenhagen
Copenhagen is known as the city of fairytales, thanks to legendary children’s book author Hans Christian Andersen who called the Danish city home.
His former abode in Nyhavn has become a tourist attraction.
Potential residents might look at rentals such as this four-bedroom apartment in Copenhagen South with ocean views, for about $5800 per month.

This four-bedroom apartment is up for rent in Copenhagen.Credit:HousingDenmark.com
Zurich
As the financial capital of Switzerland, it’s perhaps not surprising that property prices in Zurich are expensive.
While you can find some truly stunning multi-million dollar homes, you can also find some more reasonably priced offerings. Like this fixer upper on the market for $695,407.

This fixer-upper in Zurich is cheaper than most, but needs a lot of work.Credit:Engel & Völkers

The inside needs a big spruce up.Credit:Engel & Völkers
Sure it needs a little work, like adding a floor and a workable kitchen and bathroom, but the new owner will be living just an hour and 45 minutes from the Swiss Alps.
Calgary
Calgary was home of the Winter Olympics in 1988, where ski jumper Michael David Edwards aka ‘Eddie the Eagle’ became a household name and later the subject of a movie.

This modern farmhouse is up for sale in Calgary.Credit:Calgary Home Sales Group

The four-bedroom home’s interior is light and modern.Credit:Calgary Home Sales Group
Though it gets cold, buyers can keep themselves warm with a four-bedroom modern farmhouse which has hit the market for $1.03 million.
Vancouver
While Calgary is renowned for its Olympics, Vancouver is well known for its ice hockey team the Vancouver Canucks.

The colossal Calgary home is listed for $38 million.Credit:Zillow
At the top end of its property market, buyers can find a palatial home up for sale for just over $38 million.
For that kind of money, buyers will get seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and a luxurious indoor swimming pool and spa.
Geneva
In the second-largest city in Switzerland, wealthy buyers may consider this three-bedroom home in Anieres listed for $6.39 million.
Not cheap, but for that money, you do get some pretty spectacular views and a stunning outdoor pool.

This house in Geneva has great views and an outdoor pool.Credit:Swissfineproperties.com
Frankfurt
It’s known for a high-quality sausage, but Frankfurt is also a modern and liveable city.
An apartment building listed for sale in Nordend, downturn Frankfurt, offers an investor or other property buyer a building with three units included for $4.55 million.

The units in this building could be converted into a house.Credit:Sotheby’s International Realty
The building has the potential to be turned into a house, according to Sotheby’s International Realty.
Toronto
The third Canadian city on the top-10 most liveable list, Toronto is also the country’s largest.
Known for its famous skyline which includes a harbour, skyscrapers and the CN Tower, buyers can find property there for less than $1 million.

This house is listed for less than $1 million.Credit:Meet Elevation Realty
In Bendale, in the city’s east, a cute-as-a-button three-bedroom home was recently advertised with an asking price of $953,000.
Amsterdam
Who could mention Amsterdam without mentioning its glorious canals and bicycle culture?
The city offers a great lifestyle for those who love a city with quirky architecture, and also has a five-bedroom home, in need of a little work, listed for sale for about $2.06 million. There’s a definite ’70s vibe.

This five-bedroom Amsterdam home needs a little work inside.Credit:Rightmove.co.uk

The home has a definite ’70s vibe.Credit:Rightmove.co.uk
Osaka
Osaka is also known as the street food capital of Japan, with locals and visitors enjoying the casual dining, stand-up bars and Michelin-starred restaurants.

This three-bedroom home is up for sale in Imamiya, Osaka.Credit:Realestate.Japantoday.com
The city, one of the biggest in Japan, also has one of the oldest Buddhist temples in the country – Shitenojji Temple – built in 593.
While there are plenty of places to dine out, those wanting to cook at home can buy a three-bedroom house in Imamiya for about $585,000.
Melbourne
The Victorian capital ranks equal to Osaka as the tenth most liveable city, and its coffee and footy need no introduction.

Melbourne is the equal tenth most liveable city.
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As to liveability, there’s the theatre precinct, art galleries and iconic architecture, plus the Australian Grand Prix, international comedy festival and spring racing carnival.
Melbourne’s median house price is $1,092,144, Domain data shows. For that price, buyers can get a renovated, three-bedroom house at 10 Booth Street, Preston, in the city’s north, which has an asking price of $1.08 million to $1.18 million.
Laura Wilson has enjoyed living in the Okanagan for the past four years.
“We love it here,” she told Global News. “Especially the weather and the ability to just get out and just walk to a hiking trail or the parks or the lake.”
But Wilson said her family, including her husband and two children, are being forced to move out of the province.
“It’s sad, actually, that people have to uproot their children and their whole lives and leave a community,” she said.
Wilson said the skyrocketing cost of housing is what’s behind the difficult decision to leave the Southern Interior.
“We’re giving it up for financial stability,” she said. “We were given notice that our landlord would like their house back.
“And so, after searching and searching for something affordable that our family could live in comfortably, we realized that that wasn’t going to happen.”
The family is moving to Edmonton, where they’ve purchased a townhouse at a fraction of what it would cost in the Central Okanagan.
“We paid $172,000 which is cheap,” Wilson said. “In the Okanagan, you can’t even buy a one-bedroom condo in Kelowna for that price.”

A senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Alex Hemingway, said this family’s story is not unique.
“Everyone has seen around us housing prices skyrocket and that comes with consequences,” he said.
Those consequences aren’t only for people relocating for financial reasons, but also for the communities they leave behind.
“It means that our communities are becoming more exclusionary based on income and wealth, and that’s not the way to organize the city,” Hemingway said.
“We’re being deprived of the talents of those people in our cities. And, of course, they’re being deprived of the opportunity to choose to where to live.”
According to the Association of Interior Realtors, the benchmark price for a single-family home in Kelowna is around $1.13 million.
The median price for a two-bedroom rental is $2,300 a month, according to a Canadian Rent Report by Zumper, a housing rental company.
“Kelowna and the Okanagan have been one of the places over the past couple of years where prices have gotten out of control,” Hemingway said.
Hemingway added that a housing supply shortage is to blame as is a lack of government investment in affordable housing.
“We have not had enough direct public investment in dedicated affordable housing for many, many years, ” Hemingway said. “We have actually seen that investment increase over the past few years, but we’re dealing with a backlog of need and underinvestment that goes back decades.”
He said solutions must include a massive expansion of investment in dedicated, affordable housing, but also some leniency on the part of municipal governments.
“In most of our cities, apartments are not allowed to be built on most of the residential land, even though that’s the most affordable type of housing that exists today,” he said.
“That drives up the price of the land on which you can build housing, those very scarce parcels where you’re allowed to build apartments. The price of that is driven up by in part by exclusionary zoning, so that’s something very important that needs to be dealt with at the municipal level.”
While Wilson said she’ll miss the Okanagan and everything it has to offer, she’s looking forward to more disposable income every month.
“Oh, a lot more,” she said. “I think at the end of my budget, it looks like we’ll have about a $700 surplus.”

© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Yes, investors have played a significant part in fueling the red hot U.S. housing market and driving home prices up to record highs during the pandemic housing frenzy.
That’s according to a recent report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which found investors have been snatching up “a record share” of single-family homes — with a spike in investor purchasing that began soon after COVID-19 hit the U.S.
“Adding to the pressure on prices, investors moved aggressively into the single-family market over the past year, buying up moderately priced homes either to convert to rental or upgrade for resale,” the Harvard report states.
How many homes have investors bought?
Of U.S. homes sold in the first quarter of 2022, 28% were purchased by investors, according to Harvard researchers’ analysis of CoreLogic data.
That’s up from 19% a year earlier and “well above” the 16% average investor share from 2017 to 2019.
Know that not all investors come from the same cloth. They range from big, company-backed investors to everyday Americans stepping into the rental or real estate business. A majority of this activity was driven by small to midsize investors, but a significant percentage was indeed driven by the big boys, according to the Harvard report.
Investors with large portfolios of at least 100 properties “drove much of this growth, nearly doubling their share of investor purchases” from 14% in September 2020 to 26% in September 2021, the report states.
Who are these big investors?
“Some are massive rental companies like Invitation Homes — the nation’s largest owner of single-family rental homes — which grew its portfolio during the pandemic,” Fortune reported. “Blackstone, which founded Invitation Homes back in 2012, also got back into the single-family home business during the pandemic” after it had sold most of its shares in 2019.
Online iBuyers, or real estate instant buyers, also swooped into the market, Fortune noted. Companies like Opendoor, Offerpad, RedfinNow, and Zillow Offers also made instant cash offers to sellers, then turned around to flip them to make profits off of service fees charged to the buyer.
But there are many — many — more investors that you’ve likely never heard of, Fortune notes, citing a recent Freddie Mac report. That report drew a more moderate conclusion at just how much of an impact investors have had on the market, noting investor shares were only “slightly up” at the end of 2021 (however, as Fortune noted, its analysis doesn’t fully capture all-cash transactions).
“While large corporate investors are rapidly rising as a share of the market and are likely to expand, they remain so small that their market share only has a modest impact on the overall percentage of investors,” the Freddie Mac report states.
But it’s also worth noting, Freddie Mac researchers wrote, that both big and small investors “heavily target under-market-value homes that need more repair than what most first-time homebuyers are willing to invest.”
Does this mean there’s a housing bubble?
Even though investors helped drive up prices — and fuel “exuberance” in the market — the U.S. housing market has also been largely driven by real, organic demand by house-hungry Americans.
Although home prices are starting to level off from a record surge in 2021 — as rising mortgage rates begin to strangle the market and price many Americans out of buying homes — both home prices and rental rates are “still rising because of the severe constraints on supply,” the report states.
The U.S. remains in the midst of a housing shortage. Inventory of existing homes for sale hit a new low of 850,000 units in January before bumping up to 1 million units in April. However, that’s still down 10% from last year, according to the Harvard report.
Investor activity, meanwhile, compounds the supply issue.
“By buying up single-family homes, investors have reduced the already limited supply available to potential owner-occupants, particularly first-time and moderate-income buyers,” Harvard researchers wrote.
Plus, investors are “more likely to target lower-priced properties,” the report adds. In September 2021, investors bought 29% of homes sold that were in the bottom third of metro area sales prices, compared with 23% of homes sold in the top third. And typically, once bought by an investor, those homes are often converted to rentals or are flipped at a higher price tag.
Where did investors buy up the most homes?
Naturally, investors saw dollar signs in high-demand, fast-growing, desirable locations where prices were rising the fastest — big cities in the South and, yes, the West.
“Not surprisingly, investors focused on markets with rapid home price appreciation,” the report states. That led to “especially high” shares of investor sales in Atlanta (41%), San Jose (38%), Phoenix (36%) and Los Angeles (34%) at the end of 2021.
That finding is supported, Fortune notes, by a separate Redfin analysis, which looked at all home sales, not just single-family home sales.
Atlanta still leads with the largest share of homes bought by investors in the first quarter of 2022, with 33.1%, according to Redfin. Jacksonville is close behind, with 32.3%, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, with 32.2%, Phoenix with 29% and Miami with 28.2%.
Those same markets are also among the nation’s most “overvalued” housing markets that are at risk of seeing a home price decline,” Fortune reported, pointing to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics that has gauged regional housing markets at the most risk of seeing home prices decline up to 20% if a recession hits.
Investor activity spiked everywhere
It’s also worth noting that even though markets in the West and the South have seen the largest shares of investor activity, “almost every major U.S. housing market saw an uptick,” Fortune reported.
And even though Redfin notes investor home purchases fell in the first quarter of 2022, their share of the market has hit a record high.
“Investors bought up a larger share of America’s homes than ever before” in the first quarter of 2022, according to Redfin, noting investors purchased a record 20% of homes that sold, up from 15.3% a year ago. “A decrease in overall home purchases nationwide allowed investors to increase their market share even while purchasing fewer homes.”
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House prices have steadily risen across the country and show no signs of slowing. While location is often considered the most important factor in determining home’s price, the house’s style also plays a role.
American Home Shield (AHS) conducted a survey of sold homes on Zillow, taking note of homes’ sale price and style to find the average price for each style of home in every state and nationwide. AHS used Zillow’s “architectural style” filter to determine the most popular house style in each state and based its findings on these style categories. Read on for a summary of these findings and details on the most (and least) valuable home styles in the U.S.
RELATED: House Styles: Cape Cods and Dutch Colonials
The 10 Most Valuable House Styles of 2022
AHS determined that the following ten house styles were the most valuable across the country. They are listed in order, with the most valuable appearing at the top.
- Beach house: It may come as no surprise that the most valuable homes in the nation are beach houses, coming in at an average sale price of $1,223,310. Since this style of home typically comes with beach access or ocean views, its high value makes sense—especially considering that the land itself comes at a high cost.
- Mediterranean: Mediterranean-style homes take inspiration from Spanish and Italian architecture, with clay barrel tile roofs, stucco walls, and arched designs. They are typically found in coastal states with high property values, and they’re sold for an average of $991,408.
- Shingle: Shingle-style homes are emblematic of coastal areas of the eastern United States, and, like beach houses, they are often situated close to the ocean. They are known for their wood cladding and gambrel roofs and sell for an average of $960,638.
- Spanish: Spanish-style homes are inspired by colonial Spanish architecture, sharing a similar aesthetic with Mediterranean houses. They’re typically found in Florida, California, and the Southwest and sell for an average of $841,784
- Northwest contemporary: This architectural style is most often found in the Pacific Northwest and sells for an average price of $806,731. These homes incorporate natural elements and often have an asymmetrical design with large windows that bring in the outdoors.
- Mid-century modern: This architectural style encompasses a number of different home styles built between the 1940s and 1970s. Mid-century modern houses often feature open floor plans, large windows, and a low-slung design. These homes are found across the country and sell for an average price of $799,541.
- Mountain contemporary: Selling for an average of $794,574, mountain contemporary-style homes feature both modern and rustic elements and are often inspired by their natural surroundings.
- French country: French country architecture has a whimsical, fairy tale feel, taking inspiration from homes found in the French countryside, specifically Provence. Their average sale price in the U.S. is $780,230.
- Raised beach house: Raised beach houses have high values for the same reason as standard beach houses: location. Selling for an average of $734,697, these homes are elevated on risers to prevent water damage, but they otherwise share many characteristics with standard beach houses.
- Brownstone: Brownstones are usually found in highly populated urban areas, and are popular thanks to their historical aesthetic. This building style peaked in the mid-1800s, and today brownstones often retain their period character. They sell for an average of $733,890.
RELATED: This Popular House Style in Chicago Is Going Extinct
The 5 Least Valuable House Styles of 2022
AHS found that these five styles were the least valuable in the nation. They are listed from least to most valuable.
- Mobile home: With an average price of $118,689, mobile homes are the least valuable style of home nationwide. Their smaller size and stigmatized reputation contribute to this low price, making them an affordable housing option.
- Manufactured home: Manufactured homes are similar to mobile homes in that they are pre-fabricated and typically have less square footage. In fact, the two terms are sometimes used synonymously. Technically speaking, however, manufactured homes are not actually movable, though they are built on a chassis rather than a permanent foundation. They sell for an average of $121,641.
- Shotgun: Shotgun homes, which are typically found in Southern cities like New Orleans, Charlotte, and Houston, are only a single room wide, meaning you must walk through one room to get to another. They were designed to maximize living space on small plots of land, and their average sale price is $140,831.
- Early American: Early American homes are the most popular home style found in Detroit and Fort Worth, selling for an average of $148,617.
- Conventional: Conventional style homes sell for an average of $173,536, and they are exemplified by their typical building materials and floor plans.
House Styles That Sell the Most Often
While we’ve covered the home styles that are the most and least valuable, we haven’t touched on which style is the most commonly sold. When it comes to popularity, there’s one style that stands out from the rest. Ranch-style houses are the most sold style in eight states, and they’re typically found in landlocked regions where homeowners have larger plots of land and can afford to spread out their homes on a single level.
Ranch-style houses are followed in popularity by traditional-style homes, which are largely found in the Southeast and Central U.S. Colonial homes are popular in New England, while contemporary homes are the West Coast’s favorite. Craftsman-style houses sell the most in the Pacific Northwest, and pueblo-style homes are the most common in New Mexico.
In what should come as no surprise to regular readers of this column, Australian house prices have declined for a second month in a row in June–and the pace of losses is accelerating sharply. According to CoreLogic’s market-leading daily hedonic index, dwelling values across the five largest cities fell by more than 0.8% in June following on from a 0.4% loss in May.
Once again, the steepest losses were in Sydney, where dwelling values dropped by a chunky 1.5% in June (vs -1.0% in May), and Melbourne, where home values fell by 1.0% (vs -0.7% in May). House prices in Australia’s two largest conurbations are therefore declining at a double-digit annualised pace. Since their peak earlier this year, Sydney dwelling values have now lost 3.1% while homes in Melbourne have declined by 1.9%. There is also clear evidence that what is destined to become the largest draw-down in Aussie housing market history is gradually extending to Brisbane, where home values look to be rolling over (see blow), and Perth, where prices are moving side-ways once again. Pity the poor home buyers who went out and borrowed vast sums on the basis of the RBA’s guidance that they would not lift interest rates until 2024 at the earliest.

Sharp house price declines are a very important signal for the RBA, which has stated that it will be watching housing conditions–and their impact on household spending–like a hawk. The housing market is, after all, the purest exemplification of the monetary policy transmission mechanism in practice. The RBA also looks to have backed-away somewhat from its fixation with a 2.5% “neutral” cash rate point estimate, which was being bandied around willy-nilly as some sort of reasonable target. In his most recent speech, the RBA’s governor, Phil Lowe, commented:
I want to emphasise though that we are not on a pre-set path [to a specific interest rate end point]. How fast we increase interest rates, and how far we need to go, will be guided by the incoming data and the Board’s assessment of the outlook for inflation and the labour market. As we make that assessment each month, the Board will be paying close attention to developments in the global economy, the evolution of labour costs and how household spending is responding to higher interest rates.
In October 2021 Coolabah forecast that national house prices would fall by a record 15-25% after the RBA’s first 100 basis points worth of rate hikes (see here and here). We expected those hikes to start in mid 2022 at the earliest. As it turned out, the RBA initiated the first hike in May 2022. Peak-to-trough housing cycles in Australia typically take 1-2 years, although much depends on whether the RBA starts cutting rates after it completes its monetary policy tightening process.
For over a decade we have warned investors to expect much more volatile Australian housing cycles as a result of the huge increase in household debt and the regime change in the interest rate elasticity of savings and spending decisions.
There have been some surprising claims that Coolabah’s housing forecasts are outlandish even though they are fully supported by the RBA’s own model of the housing market, which actually points to even larger price declines, and have been belatedly embraced by most bank economists.
Perhaps the craziest response to our forecasts has been the suggestion that Australians should expect house prices to rise, not fall, in response to interest rates increases. Setting aside the fact that this proposition has no logical basis, it is empirically eviscerated by case studies of rate hikes triggering house price falls in 2007-2008, 2010-2012, and 2017-2019. In 2017-2019 house prices dropped by 10-11% after APRA imposed macroprudential constraints that forced banks to materially lift their investment property loan rates.
We also know that interest rate cuts in 2008-2009, 2011-2016, 2019-2020, and 2020 all precipitated substantial appreciation in national dwelling values. It should be simple for even a child to understand the idea that as the cost of buying a home rises and falls, the value of the asset will adjust accordingly. The same principle also applies to equities: as the interest rate one applies to value the stream of cash-flows attributable to any company increases or decreases, the value of the shares in that company will also rise or fall.
This is indeed precisely why Coolabah forecast a 30-60% decline in US equities in December last year (see here, here, here, here and here)–because we projected that 10-year bond yields in the US would increase from their 1.3% level at the time to north of 3.2%. It is also why we were extremely bearish on our own asset-classes (specifically duration and credit), and other sectors, such as crypto…
WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) – U.S. consumer confidence dropped to a 16-month low in June as worries about high inflation left consumers to anticipate that the economy would slow significantly or even slide into recession in the second half of the year.
Despite the gloomy outlook, consumers showed little sign of cutting back on spending, with buying plans for motor vehicles and other big ticket items like refrigerators and washing machines increasing, the survey from the Conference Board on Tuesday showed. But fewer consumers compared to April intended to go away on vacation at home or abroad, reflecting record high gasoline prices and expensive airfares.
The economy is on recession watch as the Federal Reserve aggressively tightens monetary policy to tackle inflation. For now, it continues to grow, with other data on Tuesday showing the goods trade deficit again narrowing significantly in May as exports hit a record high.
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“Right now we are at an inflection point in the economy, where actual spending and economic activity is still positive, however, consumer confidence and financial conditions, especially interest rates, are indicating a slowdown ahead,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Independent Advisor Alliance in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index dropped 4.5 points to a reading of 98.7 this month, the lowest since February 2021. Consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions were little changed. But their short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions were the weakest since March 2013, which the Conference Board said were “suggesting weaker growth in the second half of 2022 as well as growing risk of recession by year end.”
Consumer fears of a recession could become self-fulfilling. The University of Michigan’s survey last week showed consumer sentiment plunging to a record low in June.
The Conference Board survey places more emphasis on the labor market, which remains tight, but consumers are feeling the inflation pain. National gasoline prices averaged just above $5 per gallon for most of June, before slipping back to around $4.88 per gallon as of Tuesday, according to data from AAA.
“Consumers hate inflation and this is depressing consumer confidence via the expectation channel even as households see labor market conditions as strong,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economic advisor at Brean Capital in New York.
The Conference Board survey’s so-called labor market differential, derived from data on respondents’ views on whether jobs are plentiful or hard to get, ticked up to 39.7 from a reading of 39.5 in May. This measure correlates to the unemployment rate from the Labor Department.
There were 11.4 million job openings at the end of April, with nearly 2 openings per every unemployed person.
Stocks on Wall Street were mostly lower. The dollar rose against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices fell.
INFLATION EXPECTATIONS JUMP
Consumers’ inflation expectations over the next 12 months jumped to a record high 8.0% from 7.5% in May.
The Fed this month raised its policy rate by three-quarters of a percentage point, its biggest hike since 1994. The U.S. central bank has increased its benchmark overnight interest rate by 150 basis points since March.
Consumers still intend to keep on spending on goods even as they worry about inflation. The share of consumers planning to buy a motor vehicle over the next six months rose. More consumers planned to buy major household appliances, including dryers and vacuum cleaners.
But vacation is not on the cards for many, which could slow consumer spending and economic growth in the second half.
Plans to buy a home were unchanged as borrowing costs increase further and house prices remain elevated amid a shortage of entry-level homes.
A separate report on Tuesday showed the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index increased 20.4% on a year-on-year basis in April after surging a record 20.6% in March. Hefty price gains were recorded in Tampa, Miami and Phoenix.
Signs that house price inflation has probably peaked were reinforced by a third report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency showing home prices increased 18.8% in the 12 months through April after accelerating 19.1% in March.
Nevertheless, the economy is chugging along. A fourth report from the Commerce Department showed the goods trade deficit contracted 2.2% to $104.3 billion in May, suggesting that trade could contribute to economic growth this quarter for the first time in nearly two years. read more
A record trade deficit weighed on the economy in the first quarter, resulting in gross domestic product declining at a 1.5% annualized rate. Trade has subtracted from GDP for seven straight quarters. Growth estimates for the second quarter range from as low as a 0.3% rate to as high as a 2.9% pace.
Wholesale inventories increased 2.0% in May, while stocks at retailers climbed 1.1%.
“Exports and inventories are still rising in May at least, and this means the recession clouds offshore will have to sit on the horizon for another month,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS in New York.
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Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Paul Simao and Chizu Nomiyama
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
East Point is turning an old public housing building back into affordable units.
The old, nine-story high rise stands only a few blocks from East Point’s downtown. The high rise, known as Nelms House, opened in 1974. Over time, it developed serious issues, including mold. In 2004, it closed. The building then sat vacant for nearly two decades.
In early June, a construction crew had already stripped the building to the frame. The workers moved with drills in and out of the gutted apartments, which were once full of residents.
“This was a 100 unit senior and disabled person complex that was owned by the East Point Housing Authority,” said the agency’s director Michael Spann.
The latest attempt to revive the apartments is a partnership between the housing authority and a developer called the Vecino Group. Local leaders said they hope it will help meet a growing need on the southside of Atlanta.
Spann said the renovation is now possible because of the state of the housing market.
“It’s the demand,” he said. “The demand for affordable housing.”
He said East Point is the next community south of Atlanta. So, as Atlanta struggles with rising housing prices, that spills over into East Point.
Several affordable developments opened up in recent years. All had waiting lists immediately, Spann said.
“I don’t want East Point to become one more community that the average person can’t afford,” he said.
The old Nelms House is set to re-open under the new name “Aya Tower” next year.
It’s expected to have 80 one and two-bedroom units priced for people who make around $30,000 to $40,000 a year.