While Fresno has been one of the hottest housing markets in the nation over the past couple years, homeownership in the region has also increased more than nearly all cities across the country over the last 10 years.
Fresno has experienced the third-largest increase in home ownership in the U.S. over the 10-year period, according to a recent study by air filter manufacturer FilterBuy.
The 2010 Fresno homeownership rate was 49.3 percent. That number jumped to 57.1 percent in 2020.
Filterbuy used data from the Census Bureau and Zillow to rank the 70 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.
The only two cities who ranked higher than Fresno were Syracuse, New York, with a 10.3 percentage point change in home ownership and Cincinnati, Ohio – including its metropolitan area in Kentucky and Indiana – with an 8.3 percentage point change.
Out of the top 10, the only city with a larger median home price than Fresno’s $344,130 was the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Maryland, metropolitan area with a median price of $347,014.
Even though Fresno ranks near the top for increasing home ownership, the Central Valley’s largest city falls well under the nation’s average of 66.6 percent home ownership in 2020.
Notably, national homeownership rates fell slightly over the 10-year period, as the homeownership rate in 2010 was 66.9 percent.
Despite the national drop in homeownership rates over the past decade, rates sharply increased as the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the market last year.
The rate rose by two percentage points year-over-year from 64.6 percent in 2019 to 66.6 percent in 2020, adding 4.6 million home owners to bring the national total up to 83.8 million.
Adults under the age of 35 have by far the least home ownership among the different age groups with less than a 40 percent rate.
For adults aged 35 to 44, that number jumps up to 62.7 percent, while all other older groups come near 80 percent.
