Comparing the Market Caps of Corporations and Cities

"What are cities worth?" is the question behind a recent post by Joe Cortright. The answer is a lot:

The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion).

Cortright compares the market capitalization (i.e., "a financial analysis term used to describe the current estimated total value of a private company based on its share price," otherwise known as the market cap) of companies like Google, Coca Cola, and GE to the total value of the housing market of cities like New York, San Francisco, and Dallas. The article includes an easy to read infographic that allows easy, side-by-side comparison.

One interesting realization produced by the comparison, as described by Cortright:

Some modest-sized metros have housing that’s worth as much as the entire value of some very well-known corporations: IBM’s market cap ($128 billion) is about equal to Indianapolis housing ($138 billion). Orlando’s housing ($208 billion) is valued at more than 25 percent over all of Disney ($164 billion).