A staggering 93 percent of Americans believe housing costs are “unreasonable,” according to Searchlight Institute’s latest affordability survey.
Forty-three percent of respondents, which included more than 2,100 homeowners and renters, said housing costs were “way too high.” Another 51 percent said costs were either “too high” or “a little too high,” with renters more likely to say affordable housing has become “much harder” to find (46 percent vs. 33 percent). Only 3 percent of respondents said housing costs were “reasonable.”
When it comes to the root cause of unaffordability, respondents pointed their fingers at investors, who have significantly increased their portfolio of low-cost starter homes over the past few years. Nearly half of homeowners and renters (48 percent) said investors using housing for profit are to blame for the recent rise in home prices, which rose for the 26th consecutive month to a median price of $422,600 in August.
Respondents also blamed the high cost of building materials (46 percent) and landlords (43 percent) for the price hikes.
The National Association of Home Builders’ Chief Economist Robert Dietz commented on Searchlight’s findings, saying that blaming investors for affordability woes “doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“It’s been popular among some to blame investors, but with housing, the economics of that don’t make a lot of sense,” he told Realtor.com on Monday. “The fundamental driver of housing costs is the shortage itself — it’s driven by the fact that there’s a mismatch between the number of households and the actual size of the housing stock.”
Realtor.com reported that investors accounted for 13 percent of home purchases in 2024, comprising 10.8 percent of home sales. The majority of those investors, the portal said, were mom-and-pop investors with 10 or fewer homes. Meanwhile, large investors with more than 50 properties purchased only 132,500 — or 2.8 percent — of the 4.7 million homes sold in the United States last year.
“Investors do own significant shares of the housing stock in some neighborhoods, but nationwide, the share of investor-owned housing is not a major concern,” Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale said.
Beyond investors and material costs, a third of respondents also blamed politicians for the ongoing affordable housing crisis.
Homeowners and renters said high construction costs and financing (76 percent), landlords and developers focusing on high-profit projects (67 percent), and zoning laws and building regulations (68 percent) were the main barriers to increasing the housing stock.
Respondents were less clear about the impact of other housing measures, such as “reducing environmental regulations on housing development,” “prohibiting banks and corporations from buying single-family houses,” and “increasing public spending on affordable housing.” A third of respondents thought these options would improve affordability; however, an equal share were unsure about the outcomes of these policies.
The one thing that respondents — regardless of their political affiliation — seemed to agree on was immigration.
Only 17 percent of respondents said immigration was to blame for high housing costs, a central talking point of the Trump Administration’s controversial deportation policy. Republicans were slightly more likely to cite immigration as a cause, at 28 percent.
Hale said she’d like Americans to sharpen their knowledge on housing policies, so they can effectively lobby for laws that will improve housing affordability and choice for all.
“While it may be disappointing that the typical American underappreciates the contribution of regulation, permitting, and delays to today’s high housing costs, roughly a third of consumers think elected officials have not prioritized policies that make housing more affordable,” she said. “If elected officials will lean into policies that make it easier to build, they can address some of the root causes of the housing shortage and insufficient homebuilding in the U.S., whether the typical American understands the root causes or not.”
