One of the things we truly enjoy here at Redfish is interacting with other investors and real estate professionals in educational, meeting, and conference settings. 

Recently during a question and answer segment of a presentation to an investor group, I was taken to task by a young woman for reporting statistics on the percentage of females and males in a given MSA.  She suggested that to do so was archaic, of no real value to any real estate investor, potentially misleading, and she even went on to suggest that to do so was in fact misogynistic.  She did eventually listen to the rationale that I presented as to why we track the data as a company, and she was later noted she was intrigued as most are with the data on the “most female” and “most male” cities in the country. 

Why track the percentages of females and males in a community’s population?  There are several reasons.  The first that comes to mind is that as a “real life” multifamily investor, it has been well documented that in the prime tenant age bands, woman are more likely to lease an apartment than men.  Another reason is that the data is readily accessible from the Census Bureau, state, and municipal level agencies that track demographics, and it has been a standard component of demographic assessment for decades.   We also take the somewhat simple minded view that the data is simply an interesting observation about life. 

It’s perhaps less well known that now 27% of first time home buyers are single women, as are 21% of all home buyers.  Single men, on the other hand, purchase only 9% of all homes.  Doing a bit of research on the web as to the “why” behind the significant gains in single women home ownership over the past twenty years yielded a variety of suggested explanations.  The most interesting suggestion was that women are less fearful of long term commitment than men (i.e. a mortgage), the most rational suggestions were improving (but not there yet) wage parity for women as well as declining marriage rates.

Here are the top five “most female” cities in our database as of today….

1.  Charleston, SC (55.2%)
2.  Alexandria, LA (54.5%)
3.  Anniston, AL (54.4%)
4.  Fayetteville, NC (54.1%)
5.  New Orleans, LA (54.1%)

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