Homes are getting less affordable for buyers all over the country — including in places where the 2024 presidential race could be decided.
But market conditions in six key swing counties aren’t quite as bad as they are in the U.S. as a whole, NBC News’ Home Buyer Index shows.
In Erie County, Pennsylvania, for example, a blue-collar area in arguably this year’s most crucial swing state, steep competition for homes pushed its overall index score to 70 on a 100-point scale last month. That’s more than 20 points higher than four years ago, but still 13 points shy of the national average, which climbed 30 points since 2020.
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Market volatility in Dane County, Wisconsin, a largely Democratic, college-educated part of a solidly purple state, boosted its difficulty score to 78 on NBC News’ index. In 2020, that figure was 54, just 1 point higher than the pre-pandemic year of 2019. A recent report by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum found Dane was among six of the state’s 72 counties where housing prices were nearly five times as much as their median household income levels.
“These challenges are prevalent statewide but are particularly acute in certain counties like Dane, where both the home buyer and rental markets are unaffordable for the average resident,” the report said.
Even so, it’s a little bit easier to buy a home in any of these pivotal counties than it is across the nation as a whole, the index shows. Average homebuying difficulty in the U.S. overall ranks at 84, up from 54 in 2020. It was 44 as recently as 2019, before the pandemic scrambled the real estate market.
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Steep housing costs are worth watching for both their economic and political ramifications. They’ve been one of the most stubborn inflation drivers even as price increases cool. The issue has featured in the 2024 presidential race, though not as prominently as some others like abortion and immigration.
At the Republican National Convention earlier this month, giant screens flashed comparisons of average mortgage rates under the Trump and Biden administrations. Former President Donald Trump has proposed encouraging housing construction on the outskirts of cities and suburbs. Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to publicly outline her housing plans but could inherit Biden administration proposals to cap rent increases and subsidize first-time homebuyers’ costs.
“When the interest rates were low, we had a boom, and you had home prices max out,” said Lisa Scott, a real estate agent in Gwinnett County, Georgia, the most ethnically diverse of Atlanta’s sprawling metro, encompassing suburbs such as Lawrenceville and Duluth. Now, “business is slow,” said Scott, who left her career as a nurse in 2017 to focus on real estate.
Gwinnett scores 81 on the NBC News Home Buyer Index, close to the country’s overall rank and a leap from 55 just four years ago. Georgia has quickly become a focal point on the electoral map — shifting blue in 2020 for the first time in decades and delivering Democrats two new senators — but the cost of housing in its capital has shot up.
Scott laid much of the blame on private investors that have scooped up inventory to transform into rentals, leaving “a lot less homes for people to purchase,” she said. An analysis published this spring by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a Wall Street watchdog, ranked Georgia’s housing market No. 1 in the nation for its vulnerability to disruption by private equity firms.
But one Gwinnett County resident said softer demand isn’t keeping him up at night.
Mannie Marte and his wife bought their four-bedroom, two-bathroom split-level home in Lilburn in February 2020, just before the pandemic, for about $205,000. Since then, the value has swelled to more than $350,000, prompting them to put it on the market.
“We just thought: Let’s take advantage of that,” said Marte, 32, who is a pastor and wanted to be closer to his family’s church in Atlanta proper.
Marte, who’s working with an agent now to list his home, is unfazed by depressed mortgage demand, which he said might mean selling in “three months, three weeks or three years.”
“What I’m supposed to sell the house for is what I’m going to sell the house for,” he said. “And I’m going to purchase the house that we’re going to purchase. It doesn’t make sense to freak yourself out about things you have no control over.”
It’s unclear how or whether changes in market conditions between now and November could register with residents in these counties, let alone affect their votes. But even small impacts could make a difference.
In Erie, for example, Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 race by just 1,417 votes — a margin of 49.8% to 48.8%. Much larger Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix and ranks 64 for homebuying difficulty, also saw a razor-thin 2020 outcome: Biden eked out a win of barely 2 percentage points, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to flip the county since President Harry Truman.
Voters in the other four counties NBC News is following broke for Biden by wider margins but in states that are still hotly contested this year. The president dominated Dane with 75.5% of the vote four years ago, for example, while taking 58% in Gwinnett. Some recent polling shows Harris has narrowed the gap for the Democratic ticket in a few key states in what remains a competitive race.
Another wild card that could shape residents’ economic outlooks and decisions at the ballot box: interest rate cuts.
Plenty of homebuyers are sitting on the sidelines for now, depressing mortgage demand by as much as 4% as of mid-July. But that dam could break following the Federal Reserve’s next meeting in September, when it’s widely expected to start lowering rates. Core inflation rose just 0.2% from May to June, the Commerce Department said Friday, another sign of cooling that most economists see as strengthening the central bank’s case for a cut by this fall.
For house hunters in Gwinnett County, Scott said, “that would make life a lot better.”
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