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Home buyers love porches | Bedford Hills Real Estate

Of the roughly 780,000 single-family homes started in 2016, 65.1 percent included porches, according to NAHB tabulation of data from the Survey of Construction (SOC). The SOC is conducted on an ongoing basis by the U.S. Census Bureau with partial funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Among other things, the SOC shows that, over the period when single-family starts were declining (from 1.7 million in 2005 to 430,000 in 2011), the share of new homes built with porches was increasing (from 54.1 percent in 2005 to 65.7 percent in 2011).

Since the trough of 2011, single-family starts have increased every year, but still remain well below historical averages. During most of that span, the share of new homes with porches remained relatively stable, hovering in a narrow band between 63 and 64 percent. In 2016, the single-family porch share moved back above 65 percent for only the second time.

SOC data can also be tabulated separately for each of the nine Census divisions. In 2016, the share of new homes with porches ranged from a low of 52 percent in the Mid-Atlantic Division to a high of over 85 percent in the four states that make up the East South Central.

While the SOC shows how many new homes come with porches, it doesn’t provide much information about the nature of the porches. For that, we can turn to the Annual Builder Practices Survey (BPS) conducted by Home Innovation Research Labs. The latest BPS shows that front porches on new homes are far more common than side porches, and that most new home porches are open rather than screened in.