Home Ownership Rate: 65.5% in Q4 2021

The Census Bureau has now released its latest quarterly report with data through Q4 2021. The seasonally adjusted rate for Q4 is 65.4 percent, unchanged from Q3. The nonseasonally adjusted Q2 number is at 65.5 percent, up from the Q3 2021 figure. Over the last decade, the general trend has been consistent: The rate of homeownership continued to struggle. The recent recession as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic caused a massive, but brief, jump in homeownership due to grossly reduced spending.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

National vacancy rates in the fourth quarter 2021 were 5.6 percent for rental housing and 0.9 percent for homeowner housing. The rental vacancy rate was 0.9 percentage points lower than the rate in the fourth quarter 2020 (6.5 percent) and not statistically different from the rate in the third quarter 2021 (5.8 percent).

The homeowner vacancy rate of 0.9 percent was 0.1 percentage points lower than the rate in the fourth quarter 2020 (1.0 percent) and virtually the same as the rate in the third quarter 2021 (0.9 percent).

The homeownership rate of 65.5 percent was not statistically different from the rate in the fourth quarter 2020 (65.8 percent) and not statistically different from the rate in the third quarter 2021 (65.4 percent).

The Census Bureau has been tracking the nonseasonally adjusted data since 1965. Their seasonally adjusted version only goes back to 1980. Here is a snapshot of the nonseasonally adjusted series with a 4-quarter moving average to highlight the trend.

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The consensus view is that trend away from homeownership is a result of rising residential real estate prices in general and limited supply of entry-level priced homes that would attract first-time buyers.

Here is the YoY version of the chart going back to 1965.

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For an interesting comparison to prices, here is an inflation-adjusted look at the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

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Homeownership Rates in Other Countries

The snapshot below gives us a crude comparison of the US homeownership rate compared to some select other countries. Our data source is a subset of the nearly four dozen countries in this Wikipedia entry on homeownership. We included the outliers at the top and bottom, Singapore at 91% (2018) and Switzerland at 43.4% (2015).

The underlying factors in the chart above are quite complex: Residential real estate affordability, financing options, household income distributions, demographics, and cultural values, to mention some of the more obvious.