While America’s housing market has spent the last two years clawing back toward normal — inventory recovering, bidding wars easing — the market for raw and undeveloped land has been left stranded.
A new Realtor.com analysis shows the buying frenzy that swept through housing also quietly consumed the nation’s land supply — and unlike homes, that land isn’t coming back.
The study finds that land listings have contracted 23.6% since early 2019 and show virtually no signs of recovery, even as the median price per acre has rocketed 76.6% over the same stretch to roughly $62,365.
The numbers tell a story about what happens when a finite resource gets consumed faster than it can be replaced. Homes, once sold, eventually cycle back onto the market. Land, once developed, is gone.
“The post-pandemic buying frenzy put a permanent dent in the land for sale in the US,” Realtor.com economist Joel Berner wrote in the report, published Tuesday.
The trajectory of land listings since the pandemic closely mirrored that of homes — right up until they diverged in a significant way. Both markets saw inventory crater in 2020 and 2021 as ultra-low interest rates ignited a construction and land-buying boom. Both saw prices spike. But starting around 2024, home listings began their recovery, posting year-over-year gains of 20% or more. Land listings barely budged.
The reason, Berner argues, is structural. Much of the land purchased in 2020 through 2022 didn’t return to market as land — it came back as houses. Parcels sold to builders and developers were transformed into subdivisions and new construction. By the first quarter of 2026, there were just under 427,000 land listings available nationally, a figure that remains deeply depressed compared to pre-pandemic levels, even as 1.4 million existing homes sit on the market.
Not all dirt appreciated equally. Among the three categories Realtor.com tracks — raw land, partially developed lots, and build-ready parcels — undeveloped raw land posted the sharpest price gains, climbing 86.5% since the first quarter of 2019. Build-ready lots, by comparison, rose just 53.3% over the same period.
The divergence comes down to starting points and speculation. Build-ready lots carry a natural ceiling: a buyer can only pay so much for land when the finished home it supports needs to sell at a price the market will bear. Raw land operates under no such constraint. At lower initial price points and with more speculative appeal, it had more room to run — and it did.
The same dynamic that turbocharged raw land on the way up, however, has made it more vulnerable on the way down. Over the past year, raw land prices slipped 2.4% compared to a 1.1% dip for build-ready lots. Partially developed listings actually edged up 0.8%.
Regional trends reveal just how differently the land crunch has played out across the country.
The Northeast — already the most land-scarce region before the pandemic — has seen prices surge roughly 101% since early 2019, the steepest appreciation of any region. That’s not a coincidence. Much of the Northeast is dense, heavily regulated, and hemmed in by zoning restrictions, historic preservation rules, and environmental laws that make new development slow and costly. When the pandemic-era construction wave consumed a significant portion of what little undeveloped land was available, there was no easy way to replenish it. Inventory in the Northeast has continued declining even as other regions have seen modest rebounds.
“The Northeast has become one of the most competitive housing and land markets in the country, with prices continuing to climb even as the broader national market cools,” the report noted.
The Midwest, up 89% since 2019, has benefited from a different dynamic — affordability. As buyers and builders fled the costs of coastal markets, metros like Kansas City, Columbus and Indianapolis attracted fresh demand, sustaining steady if unspectacular appreciation.
The West, meanwhile, has stalled. Despite entering the pandemic era as the priciest land market in the country — with a median of $41,173 per acre in early 2019 — Western listings have seen the softest gains overall, and the sharpest recent downturn. Prices in the region dropped 5.9% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, dragged down by a pullback in builder activity, a surge in available homes, and the limits of what buyers will pay in already-expensive markets.
Western land was already the most expensive in the country before COVID hit, and as demand shifted toward more affordable regions, land prices there were left behind.
On a metro level, the appreciation in certain markets borders on the extraordinary. Port St. Lucie, Florida, and Fargo, North Dakota, top the national rankings, both logging price-per-acre gains exceeding 310% since the pandemic. They’re followed by Spearfish, South Dakota, up 287%, and Philadelphia, which posted a 285% jump — one of the largest price surges in any major metropolitan market.
The list of metros with the steepest inventory losses skews heavily toward the South and Midwest’s eastern corridor. Hilton Head Island-Bluffton, South Carolina, led all markets with a 72.1% inventory decline, trailed by Morristown, Tennessee, at 65.7%, and Wilmington, North Carolina, at 61.2%.
What these markets share is geography: every one of the top-10 inventory-depleted metros sits east of the Mississippi, in regions where raw land is harder to come by and the construction boom consumed a disproportionate share of what was available.
