The red hot housing market of the past few years wasn’t good to everybody, say Zillow. Researchers have found that single millennial women’s homeownership rate tanked in 2022.
A new report highlights that single women’s homeownership rate declined in 2022, the first time since 2016, with a large drop of 4.1 percentage points from its peak of 28.6 percent in 2021.
The three cities with the highest share of affordable listings for single women are Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Detroit, however the difference between single men and women affordability is more equal in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Raleigh.
On the other hand, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Jacksonville and New Orleans see the largest gender-based disparities in housing affordability, with single women affording less than 70 percent that of single-men.
“Single women had made great strides in narrowing the homeownership gap, but the pandemic reminded us that progress is not always linear,” Zillow Chief Economist Skylar Olsen said in a prepared statement. “Despite women showing remarkable resilience in returning to the workforce, single women’s homeownership rate took a heavy hit in 2022.”
Single men historically have had higher ownership rates than women, but from 2015-2021 the gap was aggressively narrowing to a mere 1.8 percentage points by 2021. That progress was wiped out in 2022.
After growing to 28.6 percent by 2021, single women’s homeownership experienced a 4.1 percentage point drop in 2022 to 24.5 percent, wiping out almost half the remarkable gains since 2016 when single women’s homeownership was at an all time low of 19.4 percent.
Zillow researchers note that this is particularly troubling when compared to the homeownership rate of single men, which increased 2.7 percentage points in 2022 to 33.1 percent.