LendingTree, the nation’s leading online loan marketplace, today released its study on the most valuable cities in America.
LendingTree researchers analyzed the total value of residential real estate in American cities. The real estate values are from the My LendingTree property value database, which is a collection of real
estate data of more than 155 million U.S. properties. The total value of real estate in metropolitan areas in the database was $26.2 trillion, close to the Federal Reserve’s estimate of total residential
real estate value of $28.4 trillion.
The study also compared the total value to the GDP of countries around the world, pairing cities with their equivalent country GDP values. Of course, the comparison
is not apples to apples: GDP represents a single year’s output, while the value of homes persists year after year (mostly upward and a few times declining).
“American households own $28.4 trillion of
residential real estate, a significant part of the $100 trillion in household net worth,” said Tendayi Kapfidze, Chief Economist at LendingTree. “Financial assets add $81.7 trillion, consumer durable
goods add $5.7 trillion, while debts, including mortgage, subtract $15.6 trillion. The real estate wealth is not evenly distributed across the country and is largely concentrated in metropolitan areas.”
Currently, Phoenix is ranked No. 14, with a total value of $444 billion, making the city worth about the same as Iran.