FILE - Due to the high cost of apartments and houses, Salt Lake City officials are asking residents for ideas on how to solve the housing shortage. .
SALT LAKE CITY– July isn’t the month the average price of a Utah home drops. The median sale price of homes in Utah is up to $450,000, the Utah Association of Realtors reported Wednesday. That’s 30% higher than it was in June 2020, when the median sale price was $345,000.
Additionally, the number of homes for sale in June declined about 53% compared to June of last year. The report includes home sales in both urban and rural areas of the state of Utah.
Out-0f-state buyers, low-interest rates and low unemployment are all cited as reasons for skyrocketing home prices in Utah.
But for those who are trying to buy homes, the situation is increasingly difficult.
“Those who are left behind are about 30% of households in Utah. That’s the renter population,” said James Wood with the Kem Gardner Institute at the University of Utah.
Adam Kirkham with the Realtors Association says one potential answer to rapidly rising home prices in Utah is increasing the number of new homes.
“We are always keeping our minds and our goal on helping builders build new homes, which will keep with the demand of new family household creation,” Kirkham told KSL Newsradio.
Wood says that appears to be happening this year.
“For much of the past decade,” Wood said, “we had periods where we had a lot more households than we were getting new housing units because of, really, the Great Recession and how long it took to recover from that.”
According to Wood, roughly 35,000 new housing units are under construction and about 28,000 new households are expected to need a place to live.