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The Average American Family Is Drastically Changing the Housing and Vehicle Markets

Though certain aspects are remaining constant, there are major changes coming to the home- and car-buying industries.

According to National Mortgage News, new home sales have dipped for a third month in a row as prices surge. Though a sizable 41% of the American population either somewhat or strongly prefer newly-built homes over existing ones, the supply of new homes has grown to the highest since 2009, suggesting that surging prices are deterring buyers.
Single-family home sales dropped 0.6% month-over-month to a 618,000 annualized pace after a $622,000 rate. Additionally, the median sales price grew 9.7% year-over-year to roughly $326,800. The overall supply of homes at the current sales rate increased to 5.9 months, which is the highest since August (5.8 months).

New home purchases did rise, however, in some parts of the United States, including a 9% increase in the South.

The second most-expensive purchase for typical property owners: automobiles, are involved in some major changes as well.

Recently, car ownership rates have been higher than since before the Recession. According to Streets Blog USA, since 2005, Americans and their driving habits have seemingly fundamentally changed. People were driven less, younger people were putting off taking their road test, and not too many people were buying vehicles. Since 2014, however, when roughly 88% of Americans reported owning a car, per capita driving has been trending upward.

Despite these high vehicle ownership rates, no-car households are actually becoming more common across the United States. Though homebuyers seemingly prefer newly-built homes over an existing ones, it’s starting to look that homebuyers will actually prefer properties without vehicles sitting in their driveways, perhaps leading to more money to be spent on the home itself.

Quartz reports that after decades of decline, no-vehicle households are making their way back across the country. Approximately 9.1% of American households didn’t own a vehicle in 2015, compared to 8.9% in 2010, though only a 0.2% change, that number still represents 500,000 homes.

As millennials are both changing the way they are buying homes (44% of buyers are now searching online for properties) and vehicles, they are also rejecting U.S. car culture and are welcoming ride-sharing services, effectively disrupting the entire auto sector.

“Driving will move from being a necessity to a recreational pursuit,” said Matt DeLorenzo, managing editor for Kelley Blue Book. “There will continue to be privately owned tracks and off-road areas where people will be able to drive vehicles. I also foresee scenic zones, like the California coast and other places, where people will be allowed to drive vehicles.”

In addition to California, other states that have fully welcomed the changing culture of the no-car household include Indiana, New York, Michigan, Nevada, and Maine. Those states showed the highest percentage of households getting rid of their vehicles, with approximately 1% more of households stating to not own a single car.

In New York, where approximately 29.4% of households are vehicle-free, a 1% shift might not seem that significant. But for Indiana and Nevada, where only 6.2% of homes didn’t have vehicles back in 2010, a 1% change is drastic. There were only two states across the country, South Dakota and Texas, where no-car home population percentages decreased.

“The high showing of states with stable or declining numbers of households, many with large rural populations, indicates that car-free living isn’t just an urban hipster trend,” added Sarah Jo Peterson, author of Planning the Home Front and an urban planner. “Changes — or the absence of changes — in car-free living have implications for state governments, as well as municipal governments.”

Similarly, Consumer Affairs adds that one of the main contributing factors to the growing percentage of no-car households is due to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

Automotive technology has been rapidly growing over the last few years and looks like the emerging tech will directly result in vehicle ownership. In the past, if a homeowner needed to take a quick trip to the grocery store, they would simply get in their vehicle and go. But in the not-so-distant future, since autonomous vehicles will likely offer pickup and drop-off services, that might be the preferred option.

“I believe that if human-driven cars are allowed to operate in autonomous zones, by that time all cars will be equipped with Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) transponders that will allow the seamless integration of both human and autonomous vehicular traffic,” added DeLorenzo.

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