Visualizing Median Home Prices in 100 U.S. Cities

4 min read

For most families, housing is the biggest monthly expense. This is why choosing to live in a house that suits your needs, rather than one that impresses your friends, can have such a positive impact on your finances.

It’s simply a fact, though, that some cities have higher home prices than others. For example, according to Trulia, the median home price in San Francisco, CA is just shy of $1.4 million. By contrast, the median home price in Toldeo, OH is just $111,845. Clearly location plays a big role in determining home prices.

Today I take a look at the median home prices in the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. as well as how these prices have changed over the last seven years since 2012.

Data for these visuals comes from this Trulia article.

Median Home Prices in the 100 Largest U.S. Metro Areas

The following table shows the median home price in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas as of October 2018:

Here’s a visual look at these prices:

Some Interesting Observations

• Seven of the top 10 metro areas with the highest median home price are located in California.
• Bakersfield, CA is the metro area with the lowest median home price ($212,943) in California.

• Two metro areas have a median home price above $1 million: San Francisco, CA ($1.4 million) and San Jose, CA ($1.28 million).
• Cambridge, MA has the highest median home price ($505,112) for east coast metro areas.

• Denver, CO has the highest median home price ($401,690) among metro areas not located on a coast.

• All six major metros in my home state of Ohio are among the 30 lowest-priced metros on this list.

Median Home Price Growth Since 2012

Here is how median home prices have increased in each metro area since 2012, sorted by percent increase:

Some Interesting Observations

• Detroit, MI experienced the largest increase (+160%) in median home price since 2012, mostly because it started from such a small median home price ($29,673) following the financial crisis.
• Every metro area on the list experienced at least a 10% increase in median home price since 2012.
• 39 of the metro areas experienced a 50% increase or higher in median home price since 2012.
• Six major metro areas in Florida experienced an increase in median home price of 82% or higher since 2012.
• The two midwest metros with the highest increase in median home prices have been Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI (+75%) and Nashville, TN (+73%).

Thanks for reading 🙂

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Zach

Zach is the author behind Four Pillar Freedom, a blog that teaches you how to build wealth and gain freedom in life.

He quit his day job as a data scientist in 2019 because he was able to earn enough income from profitable websites to replace his salary. He now teaches people how to start and grow their own profitable websites from scratch in the Income Community.

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