Top 12 Most Valuable U.S. Cities for Real Estate

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American households own $29.2 trillion of residential real estate, a significant part of the $107 trillion in household net worth in the U.S., according to a new report from LendingTree.

However, real estate wealth is not equally distributed across the country; it’s concentrated mainly in large cities.

Earlier this year, LendingTree determined the total value of cities by examining home value figures in its My LendingTree property value database.

The database comprises estimated home values for some 155 million properties in the U.S. based on public tax, deed, mortgage and foreclosure data, as well as proprietary local data used to power home financing recommendations for the site’s users.

The total value of real estate in metropolitan areas in the database was $32.6 trillion, close to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s estimate of total residential real estate value of $32.9 trillion.

LendingTree found that the top 10 cities accounted for nearly 36% of that value, and the top 50 added up to about two-thirds of the total. Three cities were valued at more than $1 trillion each.

Researchers also compared the total value of residential properties in each city with the GDP of countries around the world.

LendingTree acknowledged that GDP represents a single year’s output, while the value of homes persists year after year — moving mostly upward, but sometimes declining.

“Nonetheless,” LendingTree said, “we paired up cities with their equivalent country GDP … to get a sense of value.”

See the gallery for the 12 most valuable cities in the U.S.

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