Riverside Housing Affordability Improves In 2025
- The California Association of Realtors said April 24 that housing affordability improved in 2025, with 19% of Californians and 28% of Riverside County households able to buy a median-priced home. - In Riverside County, buyers needed about $164,400 in annual income to afford a $652,180 median-priced detached home in 2025, according to the Realtors group’s affordability index. - Statewide gains still left sharp racial gaps: only 11% of Black and Hispanic or Latino households could afford California’s median-priced home in 2025. (car.org)
Housing affordability improved in 2025, and Riverside County remained more affordable than California as a whole. (car.org) (mynewsla.com) The California Association of Realtors said 19% of Californians earned enough in 2025 to buy the state’s $875,550 median-priced detached home, up from 18% in 2024. (car.org) In Riverside County, 28% of households could afford the county’s $652,180 median-priced detached home, according to the same annual affordability report. Buyers needed about $164,400 in annual income to qualify. (mynewsla.com) The shift came after mortgage rates moderated in 2025 even as home prices edged higher. The Realtors group said a 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 6.71% in the annual ethnicity report. (car.org) Quarterly data showed the same pattern late in the year. In the fourth quarter of 2025, statewide affordability rose to 18% from 17% in the third quarter and 16% a year earlier as the effective rate fell to 6.35%. (car.org) Riverside’s edge over the state does not mean buying got easy. Statewide, households needed $221,200 in annual income to afford the median-priced detached home in 2025. (car.org) The widest gaps showed up across racial and ethnic groups. The Realtors group said 29% of Asian households and 23% of White non-Hispanic households could afford California’s median-priced home, compared with 11% of Black households and 11% of Hispanic or Latino households. (car.org) The gap for Black households widened in 2025. The difference between Black household affordability and the statewide average grew to 8.7 percentage points from a revised 8.3 points in 2024, while the Hispanic or Latino gap narrowed to 7.9 points from 8.2. (car.org) The California Association of Realtors tied those disparities to wage inequities and barriers to credit access. It said the gaps could widen again if mortgage rates stay elevated and home prices keep rising. (car.org) For Riverside County, the 2025 data shows a market that stayed less expensive than much of California but still out of reach for most households. That is the same math behind the statewide report: affordability improved, but only modestly. (mynewsla.com) (car.org)
