Utah ranks 9th in highest housing prices nationwide

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — One expert who’s put together housing studies for 50 years said getting into the housing market for the first time may not be easy.

Jim Wood, Senior Fellow at The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, said his latest report ranks Utah housing prices as ninth highest in the nation.

“Grandparents and parents are going to have to help their kids get into the housing market,
particularly in a market where they’ve really been advantaged because they got in,” Wood told ABC4.

His 17-page state of the state’s housing market report from the Gardner Policy Institute details “how affordability continues to be a really serious issue,” according to Wood.

The report also states that median sales price of a single-family home statewide hit over $547,000 the final three months of last year.

“A third of all households in Utah rent. Many of those renters are in a situation where they’re on the cusp of homelessness,” Wood added. “We’ve got about 40,000 renter households who make less than 30% of the median income.”

Wood said that this can be attributed to, “still being in the shadow, basically, of the low interest rates during COVID.”

He added, “those very low interest rates produced lots of building and also drove prices up.”

However, Wood also said that he is optimistic about prices going down, moving forward. “Our growth rate is slowing down a bit. So that should be helpful, I think, in terms of demand.”

Wood said he thinks that prices will not accelerate up the rest of this year, or next, as we move farther and farther away from the pandemic.