Americans who are lucky enough to own their own little slice of the 'American Dream' are about $2 trillion wealthier this year courtesy of Janet Yellen's efforts to recreate all the same asset bubbles that Alan Greenspan first blew in the early 2000's. After surging 6.5% in 2017, the highest pace in 4 years according to Zillow data, the total market value of homes in the United States reached a staggering all-time high of $31.8 trillion at the end of 2017...or roughly 1.5x the total GDP of the United States.
If you add the value of all the homes in the United States together, you get a sum that’s a lot to get your mind around: $31.8 trillion.
How big is that? It’s more than 1.5 times the Gross Domestic Product of the United States and approaching three times that of China.
Altogether, homes in the Los Angeles metro area are worth $2.7 trillion, more than the United Kingdom’s GDP. That’s before this luxury home on steroids hits the market.
In the New York City metro, total home values equal $2.6 trillion, more than the French economy — and enough money to buy 8,494 Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners.
And here is a look at the "Housing Bubble 2.0" on a state-by-state basis:
Ironically, among the 35 largest U.S. housing markets, the one to experience the greatest total home value growth happened to be Columbus, Ohio, which gained 15.1% to $152.3 billion.
Meanwhile, the millions of Americans who have been forced into renting following their short sales or foreclosures in the wake of the last housing bubble, threw a record $485.6 billion dollars down the drain in 2017 on rent, an increase of $4.9 billion from 2016. Not surprisingly, folks in New York and Los Angeles spent the most on rent in 2017 while San Francisco rents soared to such high levels that renters collectively paid $616 million more in rent than Chicago renters did, despite there being 467,000 fewer renters in San Francisco than in Chicago.
Of course, as we pointed out at the end of November, while staggering, the pricing gains on housing only look to just now be heating up...
As the latest housing data shows an uptick in sales, Case-Shiller's 20-City Composite index surged 6.19% YoY in September - the fastest rate of gain since July 2014.
As Bloomberg notes, the residential real-estate market is benefiting from steady demand backed by a strong job market and low mortgage rates. The ongoing scarcity of available houses on the market, especially previously-owned dwellings, is likely to keep driving up prices.
Eight cities have surpassed their peaks from before the financial crisis, according to the report.
All 20 cities in the index showed year-over-year gains, led by a 12.9 percent increase in Seattle and a 9 percent advance in Las Vegas (slowest gains in Washington area at 3.1 percent, Chicago at 3.9 percent)
Luckily, American's are too 'smart' to get crushed by another housing crash this cycle...no, this time around they're not taking any chances and are instead taking all their equity out of their homes to buy Bitcoin...which is a genius plan if we understand it correctly.