The total value of every home in the U.S. is $33.6 trillion, nearly as much as the GDP of the two largest global economies combined in the U.S. ($20.5 trillion) and China ($13.6 trillion), according to a new Zillow analysis.
Since 2010, when the market was battling to regain its footing in the wake of one of the largest housing downturns on record, the national housing market added $11.3 trillion in value – a more than 50 percent increase.
About 14 percent of that gain was from new stock entering the market, with the remainder from increased values of the existing stock, underlining just how much home values rose during last decade’s recovery and then explosion.
California made up 21.2 percent of the nation’s housing value representing 12 percent of the population. To put that into context, the next most populous state, Texas, makes up 8.8 percent of the population, but only 5.9 percent of the country’s housing value, according to Zillow.
To exceed the $7.1 trillion worth of homes in California, you’d need to combine the next four states on the list: New York ($2.7 trillion), Florida ($2 trillion), Texas ($2 trillion) and Washington ($1.1 trillion).
With $66 billion each, North Dakota and Wyoming have the smallest shares of the U.S. housing market.
At a more local level, three metros are beyond the trillion-dollar barrier – New York ($3.2 trillion) Los Angeles ($2.5 trillion) and San Francisco ($1.6 trillion). Los Angeles was the only market to add more than a trillion dollars of housing during the 2010s, adding $1.1 trillion.
Three of the five metros that gained the most value were in California, as San Francisco ($827 billion), New York ($657 billion), San Jose ($360 billion) and Seattle ($356 billion) followed Los Angeles at the top.
“In 2010, Americans were grappling with falling home values, unsold subdivisions, and sky-high foreclosure rates, while policymakers were working to stimulate demand,” Zillow Economist Jeff Tucker said in the report. “A decade later, we’re facing a very different set of challenges, as a persistent shortage of new homes and starter homes has kept home prices rising out of reach for many would-be first-time home buyers. More and more of the nation’s wealth is now tied up in our homes, as workers in some of the world’s most economically productive cities, such as San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle, have raced to get a foothold in homeownership there, driving up prices with their fierce competition. Most of this growth has come from rising prices for the same homes, not from actually building more homes, a troubling trend when it comes to affordability.”
In the vast majority of the country, according to Zillow, home value appreciation accounted for most of the growth in the total value of the housing stock last decade, including 86 percent of the growth nationally.