Report: Charlotte home prices significantly increased during pandemic

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - It’s expensive to live in Charlotte, but people living in the area already knew that.

Now, there’s more proof with facts from UNC Charlotte’s 68-page report on the “State of Housing in Charlotte Report.”

The fourth annual report shows the pandemic is impacting the price of homes in the Charlotte area, a disruption to the housing supply during COVID, and increased demand, which now add up to a lack of affordable homes.

“Charlotte is having very strong demand for housing; that has lasted for many years,” Yongqiang Chu, director of Childress Klein Center for Real Estate & Childress Klein Distinguished Professor of Real Estate and Urban Economics, said.

Also Read: Report: Affordable housing hard to find in Charlotte area

That demand only grew stronger during the pandemic, according to the distinguished professor. More people moved to the area and Charlotte had a hard time catching up with the demand for housing.

“The COVID pandemic disrupted that process, so on the supply side, the years of 2020 and 2021, there’s underbuilding of about 10,000 units,” Chu said.

The new report shows from 2019 to 2021, the population in the Charlotte Metropolitan area grew by 64,000 people. That’s a rate of 88 people coming to the area daily.

During that same time, the number of households grew by more than 66,000.

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“If we do not address the supply issue, what we’re going to see is housing prices are going to keep rising and affordability becomes a serious concern so that at some point people will not consider Charlotte as their destination to move to,” said Chu.

What will you pay for a house? The housing report shows the median home price for Charlotte jumped from $273,500 in January 2020 to $420,000 in September 2022.

“Housing in Charlotte has quickly become unaffordable. We really need to do something to address that,” Chu added.

In addition to homes costing more, from 2018 to 2022 in Charlotte, the salary needed to buy a lower-end home increased from $45,000 a year to nearly $85,000 a year.

“Income has been growing at much, much slower pace than house price, so in the last two years the income growth rate is less than half of the house price, so that’s creating a problem,” said Chu.

Researchers tell WBTV to fix the problem changes are needed to city regulations to reduce the cost of housing for developers, and the public should be open to compromise.

“We need to build more houses. We’re probably going to see more density, so we’re going to see a little less green space. So that’s the type of compromise I’m talking about,” Chu said.

The researcher stayed away from calling the housing issue in Charlotte a crisis but said the high cost of housing will become a serious problem potentially slowing companies from doing business here and affecting people wanting to move to the area.

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