Lew Sichelman is a seasoned writer with 50 years of covering the housing and mortgage markets under his belt. His biweekly Inman column publishes on Tuesdays.
Men may make more money than women, but women own the most houses.
The differences are “considerable,” according to the latest research from LendingTree that found that when it comes to putting a roof over their heads, single women have definitely broken through the drywall ceiling.
Based on Census Bureau data, the study found that single women own on the order of 22 percent of all owner-occupied dwellings in America, whereas single men hold title to less than 13 percent.
This, despite the fact that the average working woman earns just 80 percent of what the typical male worker makes.
And the differences are greater in most metropolitan areas. In New Orleans, for example, single ladies own nearly twice the percentage of houses that single men own. The gal-versus-guy ratio in NOLA, where there are 299,556 owner-occupied units, is 27 percent for single women as opposed to just 15 percent for their male counterparts.
Even in Oklahoma City, where unattached men own their largest share of the 324,907 homes there, unattached women own a greater share. That is, of all the houses in the Sooner State capital, unmarried women own 24 percent of all the houses, whereas single men own just 16 percent.
Actually, in each and every one of the 50 largest metro areas, LendingTree found that there are more single women owners than single male owners.
“On average,” reports Tendayi Kapfidze, chief economist at LendingTree, an online marketplace for housing finance, “single women (in these markets) own more than 70,000 more homes in metro areas than single men do.”
Of the owner-occupied homes in the New York region, for example, single women own 820,528 houses or apartments, whereas unmarried men own just 435,287 houses. Similarly, in the Los Angeles area, unattached women owners outnumber their male counterparts, 460,273 to 262,573.
All of this falls in line with what the National Association of Realtors found in October. As reported by Inman’s Veronika Bondarenko:
Single women outnumber men as first-time homebuyers by a significant margin, according to a new survey released by the National Association of Realtors … The number of single women who purchased a new home this year hovered at 18 percent, unchanged from 2017 but up 1 percent from 2016, according to the latest Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers survey.
The number of men, meanwhile, stood at 9 percent, up from 7 percent in 2017. At 63 percent, married couples remained most active among homebuyers.
You can check out where your market stands on the LendingTree study by clicking on this link.
Lew Sichelman is a seasoned writer with 50 years of covering the housing and mortgage markets under his belt. His biweekly Inman column publishes on Tuesdays.
