Wonder

Log in

Real Estate Market Size

Delivered September 18, 2019. Contributor: Megan B.

Goals

To gain a robust understanding of the US residential real estate market.

Early Findings

  • Total mortgage debt in the US is $10.4 trillion from a total equity of $26.1 trillion. This means homeowners have around $15.7 trillion in equity. These figures are from Q1 2019, the latest available from the Federal Reserve.
  • In percentage terms, this means Americans have 60.2% equity and 39.8% debt as a whole.
  • The US Census Bureau does offer a table on new home sales by value. This is only newly constructed homes, however, not all residential sales.
  •  New home sales in 2018 break down as such: 18,000 under $150,000; 54,000 between $150-199,999; 187,000 between $200-299,999; 153,000 between $300-399,999; 90,000 between $400-499,999; 78,000 between $500-749,999; and 36,000 valued at $750,000 and above.
  • The percent distribution of the above is: 3% under $150,000; 9% between $150-199,999; 30% between $200-299,999; 25% between $300-399,999; 15% between $400-499,999; 13% between $500-749,999; and 6% valued at $750,000 and above.
  • The National Association of Realtors states that 5.34 million sales were completed last year of existing homes.
  • They also do not offer a breakdown of home sales by price in any of their published statistics.
  • The US Census Bureau does not collect data on number of existing house sales by value. They only offer the average sales price each quarter.

Summary Of Our Early Findings Relevant To The Goals

  • Our initial hour of research found the total size and breakdown of the US residential real estate industry as of Q1 2019.
  • We did not have time to finish finding or triangulating the total number of existing homes sold in 2018, broken out by value. It is possible this information does not exist in this form, but more work is needed to see if it can be either found or triangulated.
  • We also did not have time to start building a list of current players in the real estate technology industry.
  • Please select one or more of the options provided in the proposed scoping section below.

Proposed next steps:

You need to be the project owner to select a next step.
Our initial research was able to immediately address one of the issues on the total size of the real estate industry broken out by equity versus debt. However, we were not able to find, in our initial research sprint, the number of existing homes sold in 2018 by value. We also did not have time to address composing a list of all players in the real estate technology market. Therefore, we propose the following approach: 1) Continue searching for, and/or triangulating, the number of existing homes sold in the US in 2018 broken out by value; 2-14) Build a list of current players in the real estate tech market. To keep it streamlined, we will break out these companies into these categories: listing/search services, investment/crowd financing, marketplaces and liquidity, mortgage and lending, property management, corporate and shared housing, agent matching, leasing and renting, marketing, tech-enabled brokerage, title and closing, data/valuation/analytics and agent services.
Alternatively, we could reframe our research to more broadly cover only 10 of the top major players in the real estate tech market, along with continuing our research into finding or triangulating the number of existing homes sold in 2018 broken out by value.