Harvard: Housing Market Study: Working from Home
Boston Condos for Sale and Apartments for Rent
Harvard: Housing Market Study: Working from Home
Joint Center for Housing Studies +4Key Findings for 2025–2026
- For-Sale Market Stagnation: Home sales dropped to their lowest level in 30 years (roughly 4 million sales in 2024). This is driven by home prices that have surged 60% since 2019, reaching a median single-family home price of $412,500 in 2024.
- Income-Price Mismatch: The median home price is now five times the median household income, far exceeding the traditional affordability ratio of 3.0. To afford a median-priced home today, a buyer needs an annual income of at least $126,700.
- Record Cost Burdens: Half of all U.S. renters—22.7 million households—are now cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Of these, 12.1 million are “severely burdened,” spending over half their income.
- Rising Ownership Costs: Beyond mortgages, homeowners are facing steep increases in insurance premiums (up 57% from 2019 to 2024) and property taxes (up 12% between 2021 and 2023).
- Rental Market Softening: Rent growth for new leases has slowed and even declined slightly in some areas of the South and West due to a surge in completions (608,000 multifamily units in 2024—the most since 1986).
- Future Challenges: New construction is cooling as builders face rising material costs (up 36% since 2020) and interest rate impediments. Climate-related disasters also destroyed over 20,000 homes recently, further straining supply.Joint Center for Housing Studies +12
Sector-Specific Insights
- Remodeling: The Improving America’s Housing 2025 report found the remodeling market surpassed $600 billion, supported by aging homes and high equity.
- Homelessness: Rates reached record highs in 2024, showing a 33% increase since January 2020.
- Immigration: Net migration remains a primary driver of household growth, accounting for 55% of annual growth in 2023.
Harvard: Housing Market Study: Working from Home
Harvard: Housing Market Study: Working from Home
A lot has changed over the past year. For many people, the rise in remote work influenced what they’re looking for in a home and created a greater appetite for a dedicated home office. Some professionals took advantage of the situation and purchased a bigger home. Other people thought working from home would be temporary, so they chose to get creative and make the space they already had work for them. But recent headlines indicate working from home isn’t a passing fad.
If you’re still longing for a dedicated home office, now may be the time to find the home that addresses your evolving needs. More and more companies are delaying their plans to return to the office – others are deciding to remain fully remote permanently. According to economists from Goldman Sachs in a recent article from CNN:
“Job ads increasingly offer remote work and surveys indicate that both workers and employers expect work from home to remain much more common than before the pandemic.”
Other experts agree. A survey conducted by Upwork of 1,000 hiring managers found that due to the pandemic, companies were planning more remote work now and in the years to come. Upwork elaborates:
“The number of remote workers in the next five years is expected to be nearly double what it was before COVID-19: By 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be remote, an increase of 16.8 million people from pre-pandemic rates.”
The charts above break down their findings and compare pre-and post-pandemic percentages.
How Does This Impact Homeowners?
If you own your home, it’s important to realize that continued remote work may give you opportunities you didn’t realize you had. Since you don’t need to be tied to a specific area for your job, you have more flexibility when it comes to where you can live.
If you’re one of the nearly 23% of workers who will remain 100% remote:
You have the option to move to a lower cost-of-living area or to the location of your dreams. If you search for a home in a more affordable area, you’ll be able to get more condo for your money, freeing up more options for your dedicated office space and additional breathing room.
You could also move to a location where you’ve always wanted to live – somewhere near the beach, the mountains, or simply a market that features the kind of weather and community amenities you’re looking for. Without your job tying you to a specific location, you’re bound to find your ideal spot.
If you’re one of the almost 15% of individuals who will have a partially remote or hybrid schedule:
Relocating within your local area to a home that’s further away from your office could be a great choice. Since you won’t be going in to work every day, a slightly longer commute from a more suburban or rural neighborhood may be a worthy trade-off for a home with more features, space, or comforts.
Boston Condos for Sale and the Bottom Line
If ongoing remote work is changing what you need in a home, let’s connect to find one that delivers on your new wish list.
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We are now deep enough into the work-from-home experiment that, beyond speculation, we have data about what happens when we work remotely en masse — what we gain and what we lose when we are out of the office.
We’re working more from home
Quite a lot more. The average workday is 49 minutes longer, a study led by Harvard’s Evan DeFilippis showed, based around aggregating when people sent their first and last email of the day. The more qualitative survey, led by Harvard’s Ethan Bernstein, found that in the weeks immediately after lockdown, about half of those surveyed were working more than 10 hours a day, compared to just 20% before lockdown. That figure has dropped, but those surveyed still reported a workday 10% to 20% longer
Who is best suited to work from home
There was a surprising finding when it came to what type of person was best suited to working from home. The expectation of the survey authors was that introverts would find it easiest. But actually, it turned the best indicator was empathy and agreeableness — thinking about the feelings of others was the best predictor of who would fare best working from home. Even when not in physical contact with other people, thinking about them is a key skill. On the flip side, those with a tendency to be neurotic found working from home most difficult, without the regular reassurance that comes from being around colleagues.
Boston Real Estate and the Bottom Line
Boston Companies are currently weighing up whether to bring everyone back to the office, keep everyone at home, or, more likely, create a hybrid of the two. The latter option needs to be handled with care, however, particularly with regards to avoiding the creation of a system where those who work from home are out of sight so out of mind, reducing them to second-class status. Given the needs of social distancing — masks, people needing to spread out reduced common areas — there is a chance company could lose some of the benefits when bringing people back to the office anyway, at least in the near term.
Source: Harvard Business School
