Housing sits at the intersection of everything that makes a city run: economic growth and labor force, university student populations, the quality of life of residents, affordability, and safety. As Maryville prepares to adopt its comprehensive plan for the next 20 years, understanding the city’s housing stock and its direction is a critical piece of goal-making through 2045.
According to market watchers, that housing stock and the regional housing market are in transition as local demographics and national economic trends shift. Josh McKim is the Executive Director of the Nodaway County Economic Development Corporation which supports businesses in the region. He watches the economy closely, and Maryville’s housing market is difficult to summarize, he says.
“It was much easier to diagnose three or four years ago what was going on: if you put a house on the market, it sold quickly and it sold within a price level that made everyone say: ‘we need more homes.’”
Low interest rates and the rebounding post-pandemic economy powered those market conditions both locally and nationally.
But in recent years, “we’ve seen somewhat of a pull-back on that,” McKim said. Amidst the transition, “we are trying to be very careful as to how we characterize where the market is going right now,” he added.
This puts the region in line with national trends according to Teresa Hayes, a realtor at Brian Twaddle Realty in Maryville. “There’s not a lot of movement because of the economy, and that’s not just here, that’s every here,” she said.
“A lot of people are not wanting to give up their [pandemic-era] interest rates. People are satisfied. They don’t see a reason to move.”
The homes that do sell tend to be moderately priced single-family units. “The middle-class workers who have planted here, work here, and want to stay here: those are the people we don’t have houses for,” Hayes said. “We have a lot of rentals at a certain price, but we need homes at that price.”
In Dec. 2025, Nodaway County had an unemployment rate of 2.3%, significantly lower than the national average of 4.3%. The lack of employable workers makes it difficult for businesses to hire and critical that the community “bring new people in,” McKim said.
Currently the region is “not seeing a significant enough growth in population and labor force participation to where we could have long-term sustainability. So, we’ve got to see some population growth somewhere,” he said.
Growth will be a challenge as long as housing for that type of worker remains scarce.
Meanwhile, the city has an abundance of vacant rental properties. The city’s rentals are traditionally geared towards Northwest Missouri State University students. Matt Crawford is a Senior Manager at Guardian Property Management in Maryville and said, in his view “it appears that housing supply exceeds demand in many parts of the rental market.”
In his perspective, Crawford said the region’s growth should be powered by the business community, rather than housing developers.
“For long term resiliency, continued economic diversification and an attraction of what I would consider additional major employers could play a meaningful role in strengthening housing demand and reducing volatility over time,” he said.
According to data collected during the city’s planning process, between 2010 and 2020 the city’s rental vacancy rate jumped from 6.9% to 10%. In the same period, the number of college-age residents in Maryville fell by about 30% as the university continues to reach more students online.
Its 'in-person' population was also affected by a slow-down in visa processing for foreign students, which caused the university’s international enrollment to decline by nearly 80% between 2024 and 2026.
In a typical summer, ahead of the fall semester, Hayes said Twaddle Realty would be flooded with parents looking to buy units for their college-bound kids to live in.
In 2025, she said, “we hardly had any. When I got my license in 2013, that was a big majority of our market. We have just seen a decline in that.”
Meanwhile, as rental vacancies have jumped “a lot of landlords want to sell those vacant properties,” Hayes said.
“There’s a shift in the way people are learning and that’s just technology for you,” she added.
Still, in its planning process, Maryville aspires towards growth: the proposed comprehensive plan includes adding neighborhoods and residential infill on the city’s west side and estimates the area will need 250 additional units within the next ten years.
Housing related proposals in planning documents include rehabilitating historic and abandoned homes, improving the quality of the existing housing stock, and developing an “agrihood” off Icon Road, combining workforce housing with community gardens and an agrarian setting to nod towards the region’s farming heritage.
