Americans selling homes in 2018 had the biggest gains in 12 years
Home sellers in 2018 had an average realized gain of $61,000, up from $50,000 in 2017.
US home sellers in 2018 had the biggest gains in 12 years as they benefited from longer tenure in their properties.
Home sellers in 2018 had an average realized gain of $61,000, up from $50,000 in 2017 and $39,500 in 2016. Homeowners who sold in the last quarter had stayed in their properties an average of 8.3 years, longer than they have in at least 19 years and the longest since Attom Data Solutions started tracking the statistic in 2000.
While the $61,000 gain is a nationwide average, ‘‘those along the coasts reaped the most gains,’’ said Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM.
Eighty-eight of the 127 metros (69 percent) reached new record home price peaks in 2018, including Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and Boston.
Now that trend might be changing as growth rates slow in some coastal cities. Seattle home prices have declined for five consecutive months, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index. On a year-over-year basis, prices in Seattle grew 6.3 percent, less than half the pace of a year ago. The rate of price growth in San Diego has also been cut in half, and prices have fallen in four out of the past five months.
Still, gains in California outpace other areas by a wide margin. Nine of the 10 metro areas with the largest gains are located in California, with the average increase in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area at close to $600,000 or about 10 times the median household income in the United States.
Home sellers lost money in a dozen metro areas last year. The biggest average loss, of $26,000, was in Montgomery, Alabama. The last year Montgomery sellers sold for an average gain was in 2009.
Nearly 3 in 10 home buyers made all-cash purchases in 2018. Nationwide all-cash purchases accounted for 27.8 percent of single-family home and condo sales in 2018, unchanged from 2017 but down from its peak in 2011 at 38.4 percent. The cities with the highest share of all-cash purchases were all in the South.
The percentage of FHA sales slipped from 13.6 percent in 2017 to 10.6 percent.
Distressed home sales — including bank-owned (REO) sales, third-party foreclosure auction sales, and short sales — accounted for 12.4 percent of all US single-family home and condo sales in 2018, down from 14.0 percent in 2017 and down from a peak of 38.6 percent in 2011.
Among the 53 metropolitan statistical areas with a population of at least 1 million, those with the highest share of distressed sales in 2018 were Philadelphia (20.7 percent); Baltimore (19.9 percent); Cleveland; Memphis (19.1 percent); and Providence (18.3 percent).
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