Attom Data reports, home sellers pocketed the most since 2005 on the typical home sale in 2020. The 34.7% return on investment (ROI) was the highest since 2006.

Home seller profits went up in more than 90% of the markets evaluated, and both profits and ROI have now grown nationwide nine years in a row. 

National Median Home Price Up 13 Percent From Last Year.

Homeowners Now Staying In Their Homes More Than Eight Years Before Selling
The combination of rising profits and record prices came during a year when the national housing market fended off damage that afflicted wide swaths of the U.S. economy after the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 began spreading across the country in February.

Millions of businesses temporarily or permanently closed or cut back. But a housing market boom that began in 2012 continued into its ninth year as buyers relatively unaffected financially by the pandemic – including a cluster looking to escape virus-prone urban areas – chased a declining supply of houses and pushed prices ever higher.

“Last year marked a unique year in the history of home prices and profits in the United States. A once-in-a-century health crisis tore through much of the nation’s economy but seemed to have the opposite effect on the housing market,” said Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. “Demand remained strong as people who could afford the space and relative safety of single-family homes did just that, aided by super-low mortgage rates and a strong stock market. But they went after a narrowing supply of housing stock, so prices soared and so did seller profits. While it’s unclear how long that will last, in the annals of history, there will be few years recorded as better for sellers.”

Those in western states continued to reap the highest returns on investment.

Since the U.S. housing market began recovering in 2012 from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, the national median home price has risen 72.3 percent.
Homeownership tenure hits another record nationwide.

Homeowners who sold in the fourth quarter of 2020 had owned their homes an average of 8.33 years.

The latest figure represented the longest average home-seller tenure since at least the first quarter of 2000, the earliest period of available data.

Cash sales at 13-year low in 2020. Nationwide, all-cash purchases accounted for 23.5 percent of single-family home and condo sales in 2020, the lowest level since 2007. 
U.S. distressed sales share at 15-year low.

Distressed home sales — including bank-owned (REO) sales, third-party foreclosure auction sales and short sales — accounted for 7.8 percent of all U.S. single-family home and condo sales in 2020, down from 11.1 percent in 2019 and 12.4 percent in 2018.

The latest figure was less than one-quarter of the peak of 38.6 percent in 2011 and marked the lowest point since 2005.
ATTOM Data Solutions provides premium property data to power products that improve transparency, innovation, efficiency and disruption in a data-driven economy. ATTOM multi-sources property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties covering 99 percent of the nation’s population.