Seller financing, sometimes called owner financing, has long played a quiet but meaningful role in the U.S. housing market. Despite its growing popularity in periods of high interest rates and tight credit, there is no definitive national statistic that captures the annual size of the seller-financed home market. Unlike traditional mortgages, which are tracked by federal agencies and industry groups, seller-financed transactions are typically private agreements between buyers and sellers. As a result, they are not consistently reported to any centralized database, making precise measurement difficult.
What we do have are estimates derived from the private mortgage note industry. Firms that track the creation and resale of seller-financed notes, such as NoteInvestor, estimate that between roughly $25 billion and $35 billion in seller-financed real estate notes have been created annually in recent years. Their reporting suggests approximately $22.5 billion in 2022, about $28 billion in 2023, and just over $30 billion in 2024. These figures include a mix of residential homes, land, and some commercial properties, but residential housing makes up the majority of this activity. Transaction counts associated with these notes generally fall in the range of 80,000 to 90,000 deals per year, offering a reasonable proxy for market scale even if it is not perfectly precise.
The absence of official data is not accidental. Seller financing often bypasses institutional lenders entirely, meaning these deals do not appear in datasets maintained by the Federal Reserve, the Mortgage Bankers Association, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In addition, seller-financed structures vary widely by state and by deal type, from promissory notes secured by deeds of trust to land contracts where title transfers only after payoff. This variation further complicates efforts to aggregate national totals with confidence.
As for 2025, comprehensive data is not yet available. However, it is reasonable to infer that seller-financing volume continued to grow during late 2024 and into 2025 as interest rates peaked and conventional mortgage affordability deteriorated. Historically, seller financing tends to expand when buyers struggle to qualify for bank loans and sellers look for alternative ways to move property while earning attractive yields. Elevated mortgage rates, tighter underwriting standards, and affordability pressures all point toward continued momentum, even if the exact dollar volume cannot yet be confirmed.
In short, while the seller-financing market for U.S. homes cannot be measured with the same precision as the traditional mortgage market, the available evidence suggests it is firmly a tens-of-billions-of-dollars-per-year segment. Its true size remains partially hidden, not because it is insignificant, but because it operates outside the systems designed to measure conventional lending.