A new analysis has ranked the top 10 states with the highest rate of new homes being built from 2010 to 2022, and two of the West’s rapidly growing states made the top five.
Utah and Idaho ranked No. 3 and No. 4, respectively, in the analysis by the site RubyHome Luxury Real Estate, which used U.S. Census Bureau data of the number of occupied properties and volume of homes built from 2010 to compare states with the highest rate of new-build housing.
The massive state of Texas has the highest percentage of newly built properties — nearly 2.5 million homes built since 2010 — making up 22.5% of all homes in the state. The much smaller state of North Dakota placed second, with 68,765 new structures built since 2010 out of the state’s 331,481 occupied housing units statewide, but making up 20.74% of the state’s housing stock, according to the analysis.
Utah ranked third with 20.65% of its properties built since 2010. Of the state’s 1,129,660 occupied properties, about 233,297 were built after 2009, according to the RubyHome report.
Idaho placed fourth with just over 20% of its housing stock newly built, or 143,474 properties built since 2010, the analysis said.
Here’s the RubyHome ranking:
- Texas: Over 11 million housing units, with nearly 2.5 million built since 2010, or 22.5%.
- North Dakota: 331,481 occupied housing units, with 68,765 built since 2010, or 20.74%.
- Utah: Nearly 1.31 million occupied housing units, with 233,297 built since 2010, or 20.65%.
- Idaho: 717,151 occupied housing units, with 143,474 built since 2010, or just over 20%.
- South Carolina: Over 2.1 million housing units, with 421,785 built since 2010, or 19.75%.
- North Carolina: Nearly 4.3 million housing units, with 781,093 built since 2010, or 18.17%.
- Nevada: Nearly 1.2 million housing units, with 200,603 built since 2010, or 16.74%.
- Delaware: 402,334 occupied housing units, with 66,338 built since 2010, or 16.49%.
- Colorado: Nearly 2.4 million occupied units, with 388,751 built since 2010, or 16.30%.
- Tennessee: Over 2.8 million housing units, with 447,741 built since 2010, or 15.73%.
The bigger picture
It’s no surprise that rapidly growing states would rank high on the list. The West, in particular, saw home construction soar, especially in 2021 at the height of the pandemic housing frenzy, when homebuyers driven by low interest rates and new opportunities for remote work looked for larger homes at lower price points in desirable locations.
Plus, fast-growing states like Utah had already been in the middle of a housing boom while trying to catch up on a yearslong shortage. In 2021, Utah was among the top states in the nation with the biggest concentration of counties experiencing rapid housing growth. That year, Utah made a significant dent on its cumulative housing shortage, bringing it down to 31,000 units compared to 56,000 in 2017.
However, the pandemic housing madness — and the building boom — came to an abrupt end at the close of 2022, when mortgage rates shot up from around 3% to now over 7% amid the Federal Reserve’s battle with record inflation.
The rapid rise in rates brought the U.S. housing market to its knees, sending sales spiraling while shocking would-be homebuyers to the sidelines and locking many potential sellers into their existing rates.
The RubyHome ranking doesn’t factor in what happened in late 2022, and it doesn’t tell the full story of what happened to homebuilding amid the mortgage rate shock.
While Utah was among the top states to boom amid the pandemic housing rush, now it’s one of the states to constrict the most.
Only four other states — Montana, New York, Wyoming and Alaska — saw a sharper decline than Utah in the percent change of residential units receiving building permits from 2022 to 2023, housing experts Jim Wood and Dejan Eskic, researchers at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, wrote in a report published last month.
Utah’s number of residential building permits plummeted by 37.2% from June 2022 to June 2023. Compare that to the national decline in building permits, which fell 17% in the same period, according to the report.
Now, Wood and Eskic estimate Utah’s housing shortage is likely to increase in 2024 to over 37,000 units as homebuilding activity contracts amid the U.S. housing market slowdown.