A Zillow analysis found 5.7 million “missing” households since the onset of the Great Recession. A missing household is defined as people who would have historically moved into their own home but have been unable or unwilling to do so.
With the missing households already out there, along with millennials entering peak homebuying age, the demand for housing is likely to stay high.
“The housing crash set back millions of Americans on the path to having their own place to call home, whether they owned or rented it,” Zillow Senior Economist Jeff Tucker said.
“Between a wave of foreclosures, rising rents, and underbuilding of new homes, the housing market became much harder to crack into from 2006 to 2017. The last two years showed that when the economy is firing on all cylinders and most Americans have access to decent jobs, more of them will be able to find a home of their own,” Tucker said.
The building of houses cratered during the Great Recession and is still historically low. Zillow said some of these things were trending upward in 2018 and 2019, but the coronavirus stopped that positive momentum.
“The sooner we can put the pandemic and 2020 recession behind us, the sooner access to housing can resume its expansion,” Tucker said.