Home Consumer These Millionaires Can Afford Their Dream Home. They’re Renting Instead.

These Millionaires Can Afford Their Dream Home. They’re Renting Instead.

One of the lounge areas at the Anagram, where George Goognin rents a three-bedroom for about $19,000 a month. (Photographs by Lanna Apisukh for WSJ)

By Gina Heeb and Paul OverbergPhotographs by Lanna Apisukh for WSJ

George Goognin, the millionaire founder of a fintech startup, moved to the U.S. two years ago from Russia. He planned to rent while he searched for a place to buy in Silicon Valley. But after a monthslong househunt, he saw nothing he liked. So he moved on.

He looked for a home to buy in Miami, then in New York. At each stop, he was frustrated by what he considered a lack of suitable homes for sale.

“In terms of price for value, the supply is close to zero,” Goognin said. Instead, he is renting a three-bedroom apartment in a luxury Manhattan high-rise for about $19,000 a month.

Faith Based Events

Goognin is a part of an emerging group of unlikely renters: millionaires. While still relatively small in number, millionaire renters in the U.S. are on the rise, a reflection of how the calculus around homeownership has changed for even the wealthiest in the U.S.

Between 2018 and 2022, the share of households with annual incomes of more than $750,000 that rented rose to 10.5%, according to census data from IPUMS at the University of Minnesota analyzed by The Wall Street Journal, the highest level since the survey began in the mid-2000s. It was 8.4% in the previous five-year period.

For households whose net worth ranked in the top 5%, the share of renters rose to 3.7% in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. That was the highest level since the early 1990s.

“That’s a funny conversation we have with a lot of our clients,” who say “‘Wow, I have all this money and I can’t find a house,’” said Ruthie Assouline, co-leader of a Douglas Elliman Real Estate team that specializes in luxury sales in New York and Miami.

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