Sacramento Housing Affordability Continues To Decline

Sacramento area home prices are rising far faster than wages. That's making it even harder than ever to buy a home in the region.

The median price of a Sacramento County home in the first-quarter of 2018 was $325,000. Daren Blomquist with research firm ATTOM Data Solutions says that's an annual increase of 10 percent, while wages have only gone up 1 percent.

"The average wage earner in Sacramento County is not going to be able to have enough income to buy a median-priced home," says Blomquist.

He said you'd need to earn $86,000 to afford a median-priced home. But the income for an average wage earner is only $58,000.

Blomquist also looked at census numbers for 35 California counties and found that Sacramento had a net migration gain of 9,800 people last year. That was the second highest in the state, behind Riverside County.

"People are migrating from less affordable markets in the state to more affordable markets," says Blomquist. "But that in turn is causing Sacramento to become less affordable as well."

"Of any county that we looked at in California, Sacramento had the second biggest influx of migration," says Blomquist. "So more people are coming there and we believe they're coming largely from more expensive counties in California."

Blomquist says if someone is buying a median-priced home in Sacramento County, and they're earning the average wage, they'd need to spend more than 40 percent of their income on a monthly house payment. That's actually the fourth lowest percentage among the 35 California counties researchers surveyed.

In Placer County average wage earners would have spent about 60 percent of their income. In San Joaquin County it's 55 percent, and in Yolo County it's 47 percent.