Houston Leads Nation in Size of Houses

LendingTree® was out recently with its study on the cities with the biggest houses in America, ranking U.S. cities by home size.

Houston leads the list, with Austin and Dallas also in the top five. Besides having a lot of space, Texas has been adding new residents at a steady pace, with the nation's largest annual population growth between 2010 and 2016. More new homes means larger homes.

Other Southern cities dominate the top 10, with Atlanta, known for its sprawl, at No. 2. The Washington, D.C., area, whose suburbs include the three wealthiest counties in the country, comes in third. Boston, another wealthy city, ranks No. 9. The Midwest lives up to its unpretentious reputation by having the most cities with the smallest houses. Missouri's Show Me State nickname clearly does not refer to houses, with its two largest cities both in the bottom 10. Cities with older housing stock have smaller houses, including Detroit at No. 45 on the list.

To assess the median home size, analysts used LendingTree's proprietary database of almost all homes in the U.S. to calculate median home sizes for single-family homes for the largest 45 cities in the country. They also calculated median value to get a cost per square foot and reveal where homeowners get the most bang for their buck, at least in terms of living space.

"The Census Bureau reports that the median size of new homes completed in the second quarter was 2,412 square feet," said Tendayi Kapfidze, Chief Economist at LendingTree. "Home sizes have leveled off the past few years from a peak of 2,488 square feet in the third quarter of 2015, though homes sizes are generally larger today than they were for previous generations. Because only a small proportion of the housing stock is new each year, the median size of all homes is lower given a median house age of 37 years."