How Big is the U.S. Housing Market?

Written by Ricky Nave in Real Estate

How big is the U.S. residential real estate market?

The estimated total value of all U.S. housing as of July 2023 is $48 trillion.

Here’s a brief explanation of how I calculated that:

I started with Redfin’s estimate that the total value of U.S. homes was $45.3 trillion as of December 2022.

According to FRED, the median sale price of new houses dropped from $479,500 in December 2022 to $436,700 in July 2023 (an 8.9% decline).

Also according to FRED, the median sale price of existing homes increased from $366,500 in December 2022 to $406,700 in July 2023 (an 11.0% increase).

Median listing price per square foot also increased from $213 in December 2022 to $224 in July 2023 (a 5.2% increase).

Since there are about 144 million homes in the U.S., and only about 800,000 of those were new construction homes sold during the last year, it’s probably more accurate to say that the change in median sale price of homes overall (both existing & new construction) has gone up by somewhere between 5.2% and 11.0%.

Using 5.2% as our conservative estimate for the median change in home value from December 2022 to July 2023, we can estimate the total value of U.S. residential real estate to be:

($45.3 Trillion) x 1.052 = $47.6 Trillion

In other words, the estimated total value of the U.S. housing market as of July 2023 is $47.6 trillion. Since that is our conservative estimate, the true value is probably more like $48 trillion.

References

[1] FRED – Median sales price for new houses sold in the U.S. (Source: Census, HUD)

  • According to this dataset, new house prices dropped from $479.5k in December 2022 to $436.7k in July 2023 (an 8.9% decline).
  • According to this dataset, new house prices increased from January to March 2023, dropped in April, went up in May, dropped in June, then went up in July.

[2] FRED – Median sales price of existing homes (Source: National Association of Realtors)

  • According to this dataset, existing home prices increased from $366.5k in December 2022 to $406.7k in July 2022 (an 11.0% increase).
  • According to this dataset, home prices increased every month from January 2023 to June 2023 before declining from June to July.

[3] FRED – Housing inventory: Median listing price per square foot in the U.S. (Source: Realtor.com)

Ricky Nave

In college, Ricky studied physics & math, won a prestigious research competition hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started several small businesses including an energy chewing gum business and a computer repair business, and graduated with a thesis in algebraic topology. After graduating, Ricky attended grad school at Duke University in the mathematics PhD program where he worked on quantum algorithms & non-Euclidean geometry models for flexible proteins. He also worked in cybersecurity at Los Alamos during this time before eventually dropping out of grad school to join a startup working on formal semantic modeling for legal documents. Finally, he left that startup to start his own in the finance & crypto space. Now, he helps entrepreneurs pay less capital gains tax.

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