The average Nebraska homebuyer is now 42 years old, about a year and a half older than the average buyer in 2012.
He’s a man, though the gap between male and female homeownership has begun to shrink. Roughly 16% more women bought homes in recent years than did a decade ago.
And he’s white, though the Hispanic population of homebuyers has skyrocketed by roughly 55% in the past decade.
These are among the things that Flatwater Free Press learned as we set out to explore what buying a home in Nebraska feels like now and how that experience has changed over time.
U.S. Census data offered us the most flexibility in geographic scale, from statewide to ZIP code-level data and demographic variables like gender, age and race.
To dive into demographics, we used the American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, which allows us to see an estimate of the amount of people who fall into multiple categories, like Nebraskans who live in a home they own and are men. The data isn’t a true count of those people, but we used person weights, a statistical variable that shows the number of real people the sample represents, to get a relatively accurate estimate.
To identify homebuyers, we combined variables for people who live in the home that they own and had moved houses within the survey year. Because the demographic sample sizes were very small, we looked at two multiyear ranges: 2012-2014 as the baseline and 2022-2024 as the current.
We used the ACS 5-year estimates to determine price-to-income ratios, a common metric in housing affordability studies, for Nebraska and its counties over the past 20 years. We used variables representing estimated median value of owner-occupied housing in dollars and median household income over the past 12 months, based on self-reported survey responses. To measure home value, the ACS asks owners to estimate how much their property would sell for if it were on the market. We chose the 5-year estimates over the 1-year because they are generally considered more stable with a larger sample size. There is some variation in data values between different Census surveys.
Because the ACS data only reliably covers years after 2010, we also used data from the classic decennial census in 2000.
We pulled all the data from 2000 to now using an API key from the Census Bureau, which lets developers access raw statistical data. We processed the data using R code and the software package tidycensus. To go back further, we used historical data tables from the IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System at the University of Minnesota in order to find median home values from 1970 to 1990.
We used Census records to find the median household incomes for Nebraska and neighboring states, which were already adjusted to 1999 inflation. We then used the average annual Consumer Price Indexes (CPIs) to calculate the original values. With those historical values, we were able to show how home prices have risen much faster than income over the past 50 years.
From 1970 to 2024, the median household income in Nebraska, adjusted for inflation, grew by 40%. In that same time frame, the median home price more than doubled, growing by 125%.
We inflation-adjusted all of this data to 2024 dollars using the average annual CPIs. Inflation can vary by month, so the medians we calculated may slightly differ from other estimates.
We also used a metric from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency called the House Price Index, which tracks changes in the sale price of individual homes from year to year, by ZIP code or census tract. Because Nebraska’s population is small and sparse, we chose to use ZIP code level data for better coverage.
Using the House Price Index for 2005 and 2025 as endpoints, we calculated the percent change and identified areas where the HPI had increased the most, in some cases more than 200%, to focus our reporting.
Looking at individual years of data, we saw that the steepest HPI increases came after the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend also reflected in our census data.
Priced out of The Good Life
Year after year, The Good Life is becoming less attainable for Nebraskans. Paychecks can’t keep up with home prices. It’s pricing out young Nebraskans who dream of becoming homeowners.
It’s leading to apartments outpacing single-family homes in Omaha’s construction scene and skyrocketing home prices in Lincoln. It’s forcing bidding wars in the smallest of towns and pushing communities to try out new solutions like down payment assistance. Our series, “Priced out of The Good Life”, examines the realities and barriers to homeownership across the state.
