Real Estate Wealth is Not a Monolith: Non-Primary Real Estate and Its Role in Wealth Concentration

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9. Wealth Inequality

Abstract

Housing wealth is widely recognized as the most equally distributed major asset class in advanced economies, anchoring middle-class wealth portfolios and overall wealth inequality.
Yet, in this paper we observe how treating real estate as a monolith obscures a critical divide. Disaggregating net housing wealth into primary real estate equity and non-primary real estate equity reveals opposing distributional patterns that fundamentally alter our understanding of housing's role in the wealth distribution. Using harmonized microdata from the EU HFCS (2021) and U.S. SCF (2022), we show that while primary residences are indeed more equally distributed than overall wealth, secondary real estate such as: vacation homes, rental properties, land, and business properties make up the most highly concentrated component of household portfolios, surpassing even financial assets. Our Gini factor decomposition analysis across 23 countries reveals that Other Real Estate exhibits extreme concentration, with coefficients ranging from 0.84 to 0.98, and contributes disproportionately to overall inequality relative to its wealth share. Therefore, the equalizing effect emphasized in prior research holds only for owner-occupied homes. These findings suggest that policies treating all housing uniformly may inadvertently amplify wealth concentration, particularly in Europe where secondary property ownership is nearly twice as prevalent as in the United States.

Authors

• Pietro Valetto, Antwerp University

• Janet Gornick, CUNY-Graduate Center

• Ive Marx, University of Antwerp

• Stefano Filauro, Sapienza University of Rome