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New Row House Construction with wood sheathing and asphalt roof

The idea that a fast car and a thick wallet are useful when looking for a house in Lawrence got reinforced with a national report released on Tuesday.

A new ranking by the trade journal Construction Coverage found that Lawrence in 2023 had one of the slowest rates of new housing construction of any community in the country. Lawrence ranked 286th out of 370 U.S. metro areas in the report.

That’s the fast car part of the idea. Local real estate agents long have said buyers in Lawrence need to be prepared to act very quickly when they are searching for a home because a slowdown in new home construction has left the market with a tight supply. The median number of days a home sat on the market before selling in 2023 was five. It is about six days currently.

As for the thick wallet, the new report also provided us a new way to look at housing prices, and it shows that Lawrence is nearly the high point on the plains when it comes to typical housing prices. Using a database from the real estate information company Zillow, the report showed that only one other community in all of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma and Arkansas had a higher typical home price than Lawrence.

Let’s first dig into the building permit information. The authors of the report try to account for the different sizes of metro areas by looking at how many new homes are being constructed per 1,000 homes that already exist in a community.

The Lawrence metro area in 2023 added 4.1 homes — which could be anything from a single-family home to an apartment — for every 1,000 homes that exist in the community. As a reminder, the Lawrence metro area includes all of Douglas County. The report — which used the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual building permit survey for its data — found Lawrence ranked in the bottom quartile of all U.S. metro areas — finishing No. 286.

When ranked against only small metro areas — those with a population less than 350,000 — Lawrence fared slightly better. It ranked 158 out of 221, which puts it in the third quartile.

While the Lawrence number was small, it wasn’t the smallest in the state. Topeka built new homes at an even slower rate, coming in at 3.3 homes per 1,000 existing homes. That ranked Topeka 309 out of 370. Manhattan, the other big college community in the state, also ranked pretty low at 4.5 homes, for a ranking of 266.

A key difference between Lawrence and those two communities is that Lawrence is growing in population. Both Topeka and Manhattan have been losing population recently. The combination of a growing community with a low rate of new home construction is an equation for high home prices.

Of course, people have been talking about housing prices and affordability in Lawrence for several years. But this latest report used a database that I don’t often cite when it comes to housing prices. Zillow, using its vast amount of data on homes across the U.S., creates a monthly database showing the “typical” home price in a community. That’s different than the median home price, in that Zillow filters out the very high and very low priced homes that technically exist in a market but aren’t in reality a major part of the housing market.

The report by Construction Coverage didn’t rank each metro area based on that Zillow typical housing price. But it did provide the price information for each community. Lawrence’s was clearly the highest in Kansas, but I wondered if it was the highest in the region.

After sorting through the entire report, I found that it is not — but it is darn close. When looking at the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas, only the Fayetteville, Ark. metro area had a higher typical home price than Lawrence. Fayetteville had a typical home price of $342,580, while Lawrence checked in at $315,779. Kansas City had a typical home price of $308,833. No one else in the region had a typical home price above $300,000.

For fun, I looked up our western neighbor of Colorado. Lawrence’s typical home price was lower than every metro area in Colorado, other than Pueblo. Find solace if you want. (If you think about it, “Colorado without the mountains” is not the most inaccurate of mottos for Lawrence.)

As for how Lawrence is doing this year in terms of new housing construction, I’m working on getting an update. The city implemented a new software system for its building permits, so I’m working to get data from that system, and will pass it along when I do.

Here’s a look at selected metro areas from Kansas and the region that were included in the Construction Coverage report. Their ranking number refers to their rate of building growth compared to the 370 metro areas in the U.S.

• No. 19 Fayetteville, Ark.: 29.3 new homes per 1,000 existing homes; $342,580 typical home price

• No. 74 Iowa City, Iowa: 16.3 per 1,000; $288,710

• No. 92 Lincoln, Neb.: 14.5 per 1,000; $291,418

• No. 96 Waco, Texas: 14.2 per 1,000; $261,013

• No. 109 Wichita: 12.6 per 1,000; $217,703

• No. 128 Omaha, Neb.: 11.4 per 1,000; $293,416

• No. 129 Boulder, Colo.: 11.4 per 1,000; $747,586

• No. 131 Tulsa: 11.2 per 1,000; $237,978

• No. 137 Oklahoma City: 10.8 per 1,000; $238,196

• No. 149 Springfield, Mo.: 10.2 per 1,000; $257,748

• No. 168 Joplin, Mo.: 9.1 per 1,000; $212,238

• No. 188 Kansas City: 7.8 per 1,000; $308,833

• No. 199 Columbia, Mo.: 7.3 per 1,000; $298,287

• No. 234 St. Louis: 5.6 per 1,000; $256,453

• No. 253 Ames, Iowa: 4.9 per 1,000; $252,025

• No. 266 Manhattan: 4.5 per 1,000; $244,024

• No. 286 Lawrence: 4.1 per 1,000; $315,779

• No. 309 Topeka: 3.3 per 1,000; $207,775

• No. 313 Jefferson City, Mo.: 2.9 per 1,000; $247,618

• No. 350 St. Joseph, Mo.: 1.8 per 1,000; $190,368