LendingTree, the nation’s leading online loan marketplace, today released its study on the most valuable cities in America.
LendingTree researchers analyzed the total value of residential real estate in American cities. The real estate values are from the My LendingTree property value database, which is a collection of real estate data of more than 155 million U.S. properties. The total value of real estate in metropolitan areas in the database was $26.2 trillion, close to the Federal Reserve’s estimate of total residential real estate value of $28.4 trillion.
The study also compared the total value to the GDP of countries around the world, pairing cities with their equivalent country GDP values. Of course, the comparison is not apples to apples: GDP represents a single year’s output, while the value of homes persists year after year (mostly upward and a few times declining).
“American households own $28.4 trillion of residential real estate, a significant part of the $100 trillion in household net worth,” said Tendayi Kapfidze, Chief Economist at LendingTree. “Financial assets add $81.7 trillion, consumer durable goods add $5.7 trillion, while debts, including mortgage, subtract $15.6 trillion. The real estate wealth is not evenly distributed across the country and is largely concentrated in metropolitan areas.”
Key findings:
• New York has the most valuable real estate in the U.S. at $2.6 trillion — just about on par with the entire GDP of France for 2017. In fact, this is greater than the GDP of all but just six countries — India, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China and the United States itself.
• Los Angeles is second at $2.2 trillion, equivalent to the GDP of Brazil, and San Francisco is third at $1.2 trillion, equivalent to Mexico’s GDP.
• The top three are the only cities above a trillion dollars, and things drop off pretty rapidly from there. Cities after eleventh-ranked San Diego are all valued under $500 billion; after 25th-ranked Charlotte, under $200 billion and after 46th-ranked Hartford, under $100 billion.
• Phoenix ranked No. 14, with a total value of $444 billion, making the city worth about the same as Iran.
• The Federal Reserve values total residential real estate owned by households at $28.4 trillion. We found that the top 10 cities account for almost 40 percent of that value. The top 50 add up to about 70 percent of the total.
• The top 50 is rounded out by Boulder, Colo., Milwaukee, and Naples, Fla., with real estate values equivalent to the GDPs of Sri Lanka, Kenya and Ethiopia, respectively.
