Women, Millennials Driving Black Homeownership: Realtor.com

Originally published on February 9, 2022, Jiayi Xu for Realtor.com.

Highlights

Black homebuyers:

  • made up 9.1% of all homebuyers between October 2020 and September 2021, slightly higher than ten years ago (8.9%).
  • grew at similar rates as their non-Black peers in recent years except last spring, suggesting the homeownership rate gaps between Black and other races still exist and have not been substantially narrowed.
  • grew at an average year-over-year rate of 14.9% starting spring 2021, 4.5 percentage points lower than their non-Black peers. The slower growth in Black homebuyers may lead to a wider homeownership rates gap between Black and non-Black homebuyers.

Among Black homebuyers, women and millennials are the fastest growing groups.  

  • Female Black homebuyers consistently grew faster than their male counterparts each month since October 2018, with an average year-over-year growth rate of 10.4% between October 2018 and September 2021.
  • While the diminished housing affordability has made Black millennial buyers grow slower than older generations since last spring, millennial buyers are still the primary driver of Black homeownership. The average year-over-year growth rate of Black millennial buyers was 13.8% between October 2018 and September 2021.

Black families have long been disadvantaged in the U.S. housing market. A series of studies have shown that  Black households are accustomed to facing more barriers on the road to homeownership, such as lower appraisal values and higher mortgage rates. To honor the 2022 Black History Month, Realtor.com took a broader view to understand how Black buyers have interacted with the housing market overtime in recent years. 1 In addition, we want to compare home sales trends between Black buyers and their non-Black peers. We matched primary homebuyers’ last names using deed records with the Census’s last name origins to parse buyers’ ethnicity. In addition, we join primary buyers’ first names with gender likelihood and generation likelihood to make comparisons between different gender and generation groups among Black homebuyers. 

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