Home prices rose 14.3% in San Diego year over year
By Patrick Kearns | Feb 3, 2022
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San Francisco is no longer the nation’s least affordable metro area, being surpassed by San Diego, it’s neighborhood to the south. The latest OJO Labs unaffordability report saw San Diego bypass both San Francisco and Los Angeles to become the nation’s least affordable metro by comparing median home price to local incomes.
The median home sold price in San Diego climbed 14.3% in January to $764,000, bringing the city’s unaffordability score — a ratio of home sold price to median household income — to 8.1.
And despite San Francisco still boasting the most expensive housing stock of any metro in the U.S., a 4.2% home sold price decrease in January on an annual basis actually drove San Francisco’s unaffordability score below 8 for the first time since OJO Labs began tracking the data in July 2021. In January, San Francisco’s unaffordability score fell to 7.9, down from 9.2 last month.
Los Angeles; Mobile, Alabama; Pensacola, Florida; and Boise, Idaho metro areas rounded out the top five least affordable metro areas in the U.S.
Austin, Texas saw the biggest home price increase of any metro area in the U.S., with home prices rising 35.5% year over year, according to the data from OJO Labs real estate search site Movoto by OJO. The steep rise in home prices moved Austin ahead of Seattle on the list in terms of unaffordability; however, the hot Texas market still sits outside the top 10 in terms of least affordable metros areas in the U.S.
Green Bay-Appleton, Wisconsin continued to be the most affordable of the top 50 metro areas in the nation in terms of homes sold. The median home sold price in Green Bay-Appleton in January was $149,900, an increase of 11.9% from the year prior. The rest of the top five markets, in terms of affordability, remained unchanged from last month, with Cleveland-Akron, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Detroit, Michigan rounding out the top five, of the nation’s 50 largest metros by homes sold.
Outside of San Francisco, the only other metro area to actually see prices fall year over year was Fort Myers, Florida which saw the median home sold price fall 0.2%. Although Fort Myers was the 8th most affordable metropolitan area, while San Francisco was the second least affordable, so the two still sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Nationally, the median annual home price increase dropped significantly from last month, but still remained high. Home prices rose 10.5% year over year in January to $376,730, which is a significant drop from the 14.9% annual increase reported in December. The national unaffordability score also fell to 4.5 in January, after coming in at 4.9 last month.
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