Breaking down the nation’s seven metro and county areas, the fourth quarter HBGI shows the following market shares in single-family home building:
- 16% in large metro core counties
- 25% in large metro suburban counties
- 9.6% in large metro outlying counties
- 28.7% in small metro core counties
- 10% in small metro outlying areas
- 6.5% in micro counties
- 4.2% in non-metro/micro counties
In the multifamily sector, growth rates were negative or holding steady in the nation’s largest metro and suburban counties, while growth rates exhibited the strongest readings in lower-density areas.
Coastal Areas vs. Non-Coastal
New analysis of U.S. coastal counties in this HBGI report reveals around 25% of single-family construction consistently takes place in coastal counties, with multifamily production accounting for about one-third of new building in coastal areas.
For the single-family market, the market share for coastal counties and non-coastal counties has held steady since 2014, with coastal counties in the fourth quarter of 2023 making up 24.7% of new home building while non-coastal counties have a market share of 75.3%. These shares are strikingly similar to the fourth quarter of 2014, when coastal counties had a market share of 24.6% and non-coastal registered a 75.4% rate.
The market shares for multifamily tell a different story, the NAHB said.
New multifamily construction in coastal counties has fallen from the fourth quarter of 2014, when the market share was 36.6%, and now stands at 30.3%.
This shift in multifamily building that has led to a higher market share for non-coastal areas was seemingly sparked by the Covid pandemic. The market share for non-coastal counties was at 63.3% in the fourth quarter of 2019. Once the pandemic hit, this share jumped 5.13 percentage points over the next two years and has consistently increased since then.
The NAHB also noted that a factor driving this multifamily building shift is the fact that many coastal counties lie in or near large population centers on both coasts, and this decline is consistent with the broader picture of multifamily growth rates falling in larger markets and increasing in more rural, outlying areas.