Real Estate Chart Reveals Your Money Has Only 50-80% of the Buying Power it Did 5 Years Ago

Houses aren’t cheap these days. In fact, they are so not cheap that millions of young Americans are holding off on buying a home and are instead opting to rent for the foreseeable future. “Just how bad is it?”, you might be wondering. Well, this new visualization from construction app maker Builder Pad forces you to look at the problems the United States is facing in the real estate market in an entirely new way. From this perspective, you are able to see how much smaller a house you’ll be able to afford today vs. 2018 for the same amount of money. So, how much smaller has a $500,000 home become in your state?

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In order to reveal which states have the fastest-rising real estate prices, Builder Pad analyzed median listing prices by state in two distinct ways. First, is by percentage of square feet lost over the five year period between 2018 and 2023. The state that was hit the hardest in this metric is Montana where a $500K house is now 50.15% smaller. Just typing that out blows my mind.

The second metric used in this study is square feet lost over the same 5-year period. The state that lost the most square feet in a $500,000 house is Kansas with a drop of 2,280.26 square feet. That’s the equivalent of losing five (5!) two-car garages in living space. With virtually no end in sight for this real estate conundrum, what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?