Tim Kitchen | The Image Bank | fake images
There may not be many homes for sale these days, but there is plenty of empty housing space. In fact, the largest amount recorded in history.
The number of additional bedrooms, which is defined as a bedroom that exceeds the number of people in the household, and even including one for an office, has reached the highest level since the US Census began recording this metric in 1970, according to a new report from Realtor.com.
Last year, which is the latest census data available, the number of additional rooms reached 31.9 million, up from 31.3 million in 2022. In 1980, there were only 7 million additional rooms.
The fourfold increase occurs when the number of people in a given household has decreased, from a high of 3.1 people per household in 1970 to a record low of 2.5 per household in 2023.
“We're seeing more guest rooms for two main reasons: Houses are getting larger and home sizes are getting smaller,” said Ralph McLaughlin, senior economist at Realtor.com. “What's more, we find that spare bedrooms are more popular in cheaper areas where it is more affordable to buy a house with extra bedrooms.”
The average size of a new home grew during the famous “McMansion” era, which began in the 1980s when builders got big. But they stopped growing about a decade ago; Much of that has to do with rising costs, as well as energy efficiency and environmental demands from consumers.
Thus, the average number of rooms per house in the last 50 years has increased, from an average of 2.5 rooms in 1970 to 2.8 rooms in 2023, but there have been no changes in the last 10 years.
Looking regionally, since all real estate is local, excess space trends are highest in the Mountain West and South. This is simply because there is more land there and homes are being built with larger floor plans, according to the report. Urban homes have just the opposite dynamic.
“If people value having extra space, then we didn't build too much during the McMansion era. But if homebuyers simply put up with these big houses because they're what's available, then maybe we did overbuild a little in recent decades.” , McLaughlin added.
The 10 markets with the highest percentage of total rooms that could be considered surplus are:
- Ogden, Utah (12.2%)
- Colorado Springs, Colorado (12.1%)
- Salt Lake City, Utah (12%)
- Memphis, Tennessee (11.8%)
- Atlanta (11.6%)
- Cleveland (11.3%)
- Wichita, Kansas (11.3%)
- Columbia, South Carolina (10.8%)
- Charleston, South Carolina (10.7%)
- Jackson, Mississippi (10.7%)
The 10 markets with the lowest proportion of total rooms that could be considered surplus are:
- Miami (5.9%)
- Sarasota, Florida (6.4%)
- New York (6.5%)
- Los Angeles (6.6%)
- New Haven, Connecticut (6.7%)
- Worcester, Massachusetts (6.9%)
- Stockton, California (6.9%)
- Bakersfield, California (7%)
- Honolulu area (7%)
- Providence, Rhode Island (7.1%)
