Only three states/regions in the nation have lower rates of owner-occupied homes last year than Nevada, according to a new report.
Washington, D.C. tops the list with only 39.1 percent of homes owner occupied, followed by New York (54.1 percent) and California (55.9 percent). Nevada clocks in at 60.4 percent of homes being owner-occupied, below the national average of 65.2 percent, according to a new report from Property Shark, which used U.S. Census Bureau data in its analysis.
Overall, Nevada’s homeownership rate has hit a stasis point, said Alexandra Popa, a communications specialist with Property Shark.
“Nevada’s homeownership rate stayed nearly flat, inching up just 0.1 percentage points from 60.3 percent in the previous year to its current 60.4 percent,” she said. “In Nevada’s four largest cities, homeownership rose in one, and in three, rates trended down.”
North Las Vegas currently has the highest rate of owner-occupied homes in the state at 65.1 percent, followed by Henderson (64.7 percent), Enterprise (64.2 percent), Las Vegas (56.8 percent) and Reno (51.8 percent).
Nevada also has one of the highest rates of owner-held homes that are vacant at 1.1 percent, which puts it as the sixth highest state in the country.
Reno had the biggest jump in homeownership rates among Nevada’s biggest cities at 1.74 percentage points, rising to 51.8 percent in 2024 from 50.1 percent in 2023. The city of Las Vegas had one of the steepest declines in homeownership in the state, dropping 2.17 percentage points from the previous year’s 59 percent to 56.8 percent in 2024.
Other states with similar homeownership rate changes to Nevada were Massachusetts, Texas and California, all moving up only 0.1 percentage points.
Renter-occupied homes
Regarding renter-occupied homes, Nevada also had the fourth-highest level (39.6 percent).
North Las Vegas (34.9 percent) and Henderson (35.3 percent) have the eighth and ninth lowest rates of renter-occupied homes in the country.
According to the Property Shark report, Nevada had the 14th highest net migration (13,275 residents added last year), while Florida topped the list adding 249,064 residents. California lost approximately 341,866 residents who moved to another state.
Home prices in Southern Nevada stayed at a record high in February as the median sale price for a house sold in February was $485,000, the same it was in January, a record high, signaling a potential slowdown in price increases across the Las Vegas Valley that have continued over the past few months according to Las Vegas Realtors statistics.
The overall national homeownership rate hit a high water mark before the Great Recession when 69.2 percent of people owned the house they lived in in the second quarter of 2004, according to Property Shark. That number dropped to 62.9 percent in the second quarter of 2016, then spiked back up to 67.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 before dropping to its current rate of 65.2 percent.
Construction of new homes across the country has also been on a steady rise since bottoming out in January 2011 when only approximately 35,000 units were built.
The high water mark in the U.S. for home construction was December 2005 when approximately 187,500 new homes hit the market. In July 2024, the latest statistics from Property Shark’s report, 133,200 homes were built, an approximate number the country has not hit since back in June of 2000 when 133,500 homes were built.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.
