Essex County Home Prices Remain Unaffordable, Report Says

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — A new housing affordability report shows home ownership is still out of reach for many Essex County residents, as well as a vast majority of other potential buyers and renters in the United States.

Attom, a curator of national real estate and land data, recently released its U.S. Home Affordability Report for the third quarter of 2022. The report shows that median-priced single-family homes and condos remain less affordable now than a year ago in 99 percent of the 581 U.S. counties analyzed. That’s up from 69 percent in the third quarter of 2021, according to the report.

Attom’s quarterly report is an in-depth analysis of historical home affordability trends. It spotlights communities where home prices are outpacing wage growth, as well as the annual income typically needed to buy a home.

The report determines affordability for average wage earners by calculating the amount of income needed to make monthly house payments — including mortgage, property taxes and insurance — on a median-priced home, assuming a 20 percent down payment is made and the potential buyer has a 28 percent maximum debt-to-income ratio. The information is then compared to annualized average weekly wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Here’s a snapshot of housing affordability and wage growth in Essex County, according to Attom’s report:

• Population: 863,728
• Total housing units: 334,896
• Q3 2022 median sales price: $530,000
• Year-over-year median home price growth: 10.4 percent
• Annualized weekly wages: $80,860
• Year-over-year annualized wage growth: 2.4 percent
• Q3 2022 Affordability Index - 78 (under 100 is “less affordable than historic average)

Essex County isn’t the only area seeing rising home prices, researchers said.

Compared to historical levels, median home prices in 574 of 581 (99 percent) of the counties analyzed are less affordable than in the past, according to the report. Overall, the median national home price is up 10 percent over the past year, while average annual wages across the country have grown just 6 percent.

Among the 48 counties in the report with a population of at least 1 million, the biggest year-over-year increases in median home prices during the third quarter of 2022 were reported in the following counties:

Home prices were greater than weekly annualized wage growth in 488 of the 581 counties analyzed in the report. The largest discrepancies were found in the following counties:

Wage growth surpassed home prices in the third quarter of 2022 in only 93 counties in the report. The largest of those counties are:

“While home prices have declined a bit quarter-over-quarter, they’re still higher than they were a year ago, and interest rates have essentially doubled,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at Attom, said in a statement. “Many prospective homebuyers simply can’t afford the home they hoped to buy, and in many cases no longer qualify for the mortgage they’d need.”

A reason behind the historically high prices, according to the report, is ongoing demand as “homebuyers continue chasing an extremely small supply of properties for sale.”

Despite demand, home sales are down as mortgage rates steadily climbed this year from just above 3 percent to near 6 percent for a 30-year loan.

See the full Q3 2022 Home Affordability Report.

This article contains reporting from the Patch national desk

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