San Diego has surpassed San Francisco as the least affordable metro area to buy a home, according to an unaffordability report by OJO Labs.
The report compared median home prices to local incomes and found that San Diego surpassed San Francisco and Los Angeles as the most unaffordable metro area in the area.
San Francisco still holds the crown as the most expensive housing stock of any metro in the U.S. According to the report, a 4.2 percent home sold price decrease in January on an annual basis drove San Francisco’s unaffordability score below 8 to 7.9 since the agency began tracking data in July 2021.
Compared to the year prior, San Francisco’s unaffordability score fell to 7.9, down from 9.2 last month. In San Diego, the median home sold price increased by 14.3 percent in January, bringing the city’s unaffordability score to 8.1.
On a national level, the median annual home prices increased 10.5 percent year over year in January to $376,730. According to the report, this was a significant drop from the 14.9 percent annual increase reported in December.
As a result, the national unaffordability score also fell to 4.5 in January.
The largest home price increase was observed in Austin, Texas with a 35.5 percent increase year over year, according to the data from OJO labs estate search site Movoto.
The most affordable metro area in the nation is Green Bay- Appleton, Wisconsin with the median home sold price at $149,900 and an increase of 11.9 percent from the year prior.
According to OJO labs, the only other metro area outside of San Francisco that saw a fall in prices year over year was Fort Meyers, Florida with a drop of 0.2 percent. Fort Meyers ranks as the 8th most affordable metropolitan area.
Los Angeles; Mobile, Alabama; Pensacola, Florida; and Boise, Idaho metro areas rounded out the top five least affordable metro areas in the U.S. Conversely, the top five markets, in terms of affordability, is Cleveland-Akron, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Detroit, Michigan.
