Since 2020, U.S. home values have risen by 45.3 percent. In other words, more than 10 years of typical home value growth has been packed into a five-year period, a new report from Zillow shows.
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The start of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago brought with it a huge shift in how Americans live. It also had an outsized impact on the housing market, which continues today.
Since 2020, U.S. home values have risen by 45.3 percent. In other words, more than 10 years of typical home value growth has been packed into a five-year period, a new report from Zillow shows.
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Initially, Americans flocked to Sun Belt markets as they gained the ability to work remotely, including Austin, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and many Florida cities). Then, as mortgage rates started to rise in 2022, more people shifted to affordable Midwest and Great Lakes region markets.
Here’s where the needle has moved the most and the least in the past five years, according to Zillow’s report.
US home values surge
Credit: Zillow
Prior to the pandemic, home values in the U.S. grew about 4 percent per year, on average. However, the 45.3 percent growth in home values since February 2020 shows that about 11 years of average growth were condensed into five years.
The Miami-Dade, Florida, metro area has seen the greatest overall growth since February 2020, with home values rising 61.1 percent. Not far behind are a mix of East Coast and West Coast hot spots: Charlotte, North Carolina (58.2 percent growth); Hartford, Connecticut (58.1 percent growth); Tampa, Florida (58 percent growth); and San Diego, California (55.6 percent growth).
By contrast, New Orleans, Louisiana, saw the least home value growth in the past five years at 3 percent. San Francisco, California (22.7 percent growth); Minneapolis, Minnesota (27.3 percent growth); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (31.2 percent growth) and Baltimore, Maryland (31.2 percent growth), were also at the bottom of home value growth rankings.
The upside of this staggering growth is that homeowners have made significant strides in gaining home equity since 2020, but the downside is that homeownership affordability has continued to worsen as mortgage rates have also continued to climb. The typical monthly payment on a U.S. home today has risen by $1,032 or 80.6 percent since February 2020. In a dozen markets across the country, a homeowner’s monthly payment has more than doubled during that period.
Austin, Texas, saw the biggest ups and downs during this period, with home values surging more than any other metro by 40.3 percent in the year ending August 2021. Then the metro swung to the opposite side of the pendulum and saw the biggest annual decline in home values during the year ending July 2023 as mortgage rates dampened consumer demand, with values falling by 14 percent that year. Significant new home construction that year also helped balance the market.
The only other metros that saw home value gains close to Austin’s were Tampa, Florida (up 30.6 percent in the year ending June 2022) and Raleigh, North Carolina (up 30.2 percent in the year ending May 2022). The only metros to come close to Austin in its annual home value losses were San Francisco (values fell 12.1 percent the year ending May 2023) and San Jose, California (values fell 12 percent the year ending May 2023).
The rental market
Credit: Zillow
In the rental market, prices have increased 33.4 percent or about $500 per month since the pandemic began. Some of the same markets that saw the greatest home value growth also saw outsized gains in the rental market, including Miami (54.1 percent growth), Tampa, Florida (53.1 percent growth) and Hartford, Connecticut (44.4 percent growth). Providence, Rhode Island (50.4 percent growth) and Riverside, California (45.3 percent growth) were also in the top five cities for rent growth.
San Francisco (6.8 percent growth); San Jose, California (10.2 percent growth); Minneapolis, Minnesota (15.9 percent growth); Austin, Texas (17.6 percent growth); and San Antonio, Texas (19.4 percent growth) were the only markets that saw rent growth below 20 percent during this five-year period.
With the exception of New York City’s rental market, rent growth across the country has largely been driven by the single-family rental market as potential homebuyers have decided to rent for longer due to affordability concerns, Zillow noted.
The median age of a renter increased from 40 to 42 from 2023 to 2024, according to Zillow’s Consumer Housing Trends Report. Meanwhile, single-family rents have increased 41 percent since the pandemic began, hitting 20 percent higher than the typical rent for a multifamily unit at the end of 2024 — a new record.
Multifamily rents have only grown 26.5 percent since the pandemic began, which is strong, but dwarfed by the substantial growth in single-family rents during the same period. The ramping up of multifamily construction, which hit a 50-year high at the end of 2024, has helped curb rent growth on multifamily units, Zillow said.
Email Lillian Dickerson
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