The U.S. housing market has 14.8 million vacant properties, and three states have the most relative to their housing stock, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday.
Alaska, Maine and Vermont have the highest percentage, the LendingTree study suggested, offering about 285,000 vacant properties combined.
The states with the lowest vacancy rates were Connecticut, Oregon and Washington, but they offered a higher total: 495,000 vacant homes.
The personal finance website said Alaska, Maine and Vermont likely have high vacancy rates because those states have several homes the owners use seasonally or only for recreation.
"Also, the states with the highest vacancy rates tend to be a little more sparsely populated, lacking the giant urban centers we see in many states at the other end of the list," Matt Schulz, the site's chief consumer finance analyst, said in a statement. "That sparseness potentially means more land on which to build, which can potentially lead to oversupply and then more vacancies.”
Homebuilders can't keep up with the demand
Almost 15 million vacant homes might land as a jarring number considering how the nation was experiencing a housing shortage of roughly 3.7 million units as of 2024, according to the latest tally from Freddie Mac.
Americans have been clamoring to buy a home, particularly in major cities and suburbs, but homebuilders have not been able to keep pace with demand. Elevated mortgage rates and rising home prices have kept some would-be buyers on the sidelines this year, economists have noted.
"At this critical stage of the housing market, it is all about mortgage rates," Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said in a statement last month as pending homes sales slipped 6.3%. "Despite an increase in housing inventory, we are not seeing higher home sales. Lower mortgage rates are essential to bring home buyers back into the housing market."
LendingTree built its home vacancy ranking after reviewing 2023 Census American Community Survey data. Researchers took the number of vacant households and divided that tally by the total number of households in each state.
Of the 14.8 million vacant properties, roughly 5.6 million of them sit in the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas — including New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis, the website said in a separate study.
"This doesn’t mean that millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are littering the streets of America’s biggest cities," Schulz said in the statement. "These homes may have been sold and just waiting for their new owner to move in or they may be seasonal rental properties, for example."
The headline on the lowest vacancy chart was corrected on June 18.