unfortunately, i'm in Vienna, VA, with a price tag of $754,000.
i recently bought a 1,000 sq. ft. cramped 3 bedroom that hadnt been updated since it was new in the 60's for $275,000 and it was a steal.

I can't wait to move somewhere cheaper.

It would be interesting to cross reference these prices with average income in different industries...

Seattle WA $514,666

Portland OR $357,233 and soon to be Boston MA (again) $1,275,000. Looks like I need a raise.

bRink - I use to live in Bellevue/worked in Seattle. Where are you at?

$1.7 million. I feel so poor.

Moved from: Santa Monica CA $1,766,666

to:Northampton MA $431,000

Still doesn't feel cheap, but at least it's a little closer to my ballpark.

Yep, I should move to Tacoma too... Katze, I live in the International District. Renting obviously... Working in Seattle now. I lived n Bellevue too for a short while before moving into the city.

So the winner is...

Minot ND $132,333.

and the loser is...

Beverly Hills CA $1,800,000...

If you sell your 4 bedroom home in Beverly Hills, you can start your own village in Minot ND...

good luck finding this one. at least if it's in good condition and you'd actually WANT it. we had a hard time finding a 3br in good condition in an area we wanted to be for under $250k. in the end, we abandoned the 'good condition' criteria...

We're all about affordable real estate in Cincinnati:

Cincinnati OH $248,853

This would actually get me a nice fixer-upper in an area that I want to be in, too.

It's kind of frightening how (relatively) affordable the rest of the country looks compared to California.

And does anyone else find it ironic that Cadillac, MI is near the bottom of the barrel?

Baltimore MD $536,250
Columbia MD $462,975

Although those numbers may be technically accurate, they don't do a very good job of painting the whole picture. There are still decent houses available in Baltimore for under 150k (not 4 bedroom ones though). Columbia, a suburb 30 miles away, has virtually nothing available for under 250k.

where is los angeles????? 90210 and 90401 are NOT los angeles!

and what about Brooklyn or Manhattan???

the most populous places have been ignored! what a travesty! a conspiracy!
I demand to know how unaffordable the most popular places to live are!!!!

arbormurderer, you really want to know?

ok - since i'm house hunting in NY/NJ (crazy- i know) a typical 2~3 bedrm in Manh (apt or condo- maybe even a townhouse) will run you about 680K. and thats cheap brudda. a high end one - close to 800K. In bklyn you might get one for 580~600K, but theyre doing the whole affordable housing movement over here, so that may change. plus the market is still declining.

K-
(snicker) thanks for new moniker!

treekiller
"home values for 2,200 square foot single-family dwellings with four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a family room (or equivalent) and a two-car garage"

Can you find any of these anywhere else in LA?

j

Wow, that's almost painful. Some here must be dropping some fairly astronomical mortgage, tax, and insurance payments each month. Having sort of property-laddered my way along, and now living way the hell out in the sticks, I can't even wrap my brain around what some of your payments must be...

Hmm, I'm skeptical. Here's the prices for the Twin Cities metro-

Edina MN $438,662
An upscale 1st ring suburb. Old money country club types live there.

Lake Minnetonka MN $405,200
Well, if they only counted homes on the lake the price would be in the millions, but again, very upscale area in the exurbs.

Minneapolis MN $421,433
For a 4 bedroom 2.5 bath house you'd have to buy an older "estate" home since most of their housing stock was built before 2,200 sq ft was norm.

St. Paul MN $409,117
Same deal as Mpls above.

In reality if you want that "american dream" house in the twin cities you can spend $400k for the best neighborhoods. Or you can spend about $100k less and live where most everyone else lives. My neighbor is selling for $333k. Must be a bargain according to this list.

A-
I'll take a minnesota $400k house any day! Mpls has better neighborhoods for that price then any of other cities I've lived in:

LA can't touch this price without heading to the desert 3 hours outside the city, and no, you won't find anything for this price except with bars on the windows and gangland on the streets in LA.

Philly will get you killed at this price,

nothing big enough in NY except Staten Island or rahway for this price and who want's to live there?????

So does anybody else want to move to the miniapple????

i'm with bRink in seattle: $514,666.

Actually when I lived in Sioux City (coming in at $184,000 according to above stats) I was looking at a 3.5 bedroom, 2 bath house, garage, yard and garden, un finished basement, big kitchen, dining room, porch etc, for $85,000. It was about 2,000 s.f. I think and had wood beams/coffered ceilings, leaded glass, & open wood stair. Needed some love, but where else could you get that? Wasn't the best neighborhood, but not exactly scary either.

Also in Sioux City, I lived down the street from a huge old 1890's mansion that was on the market for several years at around 300k - the kind that has a carriage/guest house in the back and a 3rd floor ballroom. Probably 5-6 bedrooms, servant quarters, beautiful interior woodwork, inlays and built ins. It eventually sold for 160k. I also looked at a house designed by a semi-known architect with a carriage house, three stories, 5 bedrooms, attic playroom, on the national register for historic places, etc, and I am pretty sure it was less than 300k - it sold pretty quick though.

These are old houses that are leaky, have awkward updates, and need repairs, but that's what I'd want anyways.

do any archinector's live in a 'masterplanned' community? or in a 'development'?

I'm currently in a 1920's Minneapolis garden city residential area surrounded by parks...

before, I was living above urban crossroads in LA in a 1920's hillside garden apartment,

before that, I was in a 1904 rowhouse in west philly, then a ???? crappy rowhouse in center city

then a 1910 concrete werehouse by cass gilbert on the waterfront of brooklyn...

never lived in any building stock newer the the 1930s...

Treekiller - $400k in Minneapolis might sound cheap coming from LA, but it isn't that cheap looking at the price inflation of the past 5 years. Does the average family in MN have the ability to afford a $400k house? Better yet, does the average family in San Francisco earn the $400k/year to buy the average $1.5M home? Nope and Nope. Just like internet stocks weren't worth their valuations back in 2000, real estate isn't worth what it's currently priced at.

Hope I'm wrong because my money isn't where my mouth is after buying a house.

i bought a house in seattle back in mid 2001. it has appreciated at least 100k in that time if not more.

e - those are paper gains. Your house hasn't appreciated a dime until you sell it. Unfortunately home equity loans allow people to cash out money giving them the belief appreciation is real and not assumed. Fact is appreciation is often based on appraisals with shaky proof of actual value.

Many people that have cashed out their equity used it to reinvest into more real estate. (everyone else just pissed it away.) HELOC's are nearly criminal and the modern version of the margin call during the 1920's stock market boom. When home prices fall and the economy turns south will we see homeowners jumping out of their windows?

Found this video the other day. Worth a view if you've got 20 minutes.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2923166850569585085

The Average sale of a house in Greenwich CT is 1,745,000. The mill
rate is 11.50 so you pay taxes of $20,085.00 if your not connected to the sewer and $21,812.5. Guess I won't be relocating there anytime soon.

In case anybody is interested...

I recently stayed at a "historic" B&B in Port Angeles, WA (on the olympic peninsula), an old english type three storey inn with must be something like 7 bedrooms, basically a bathroom each, fully furnished with stuff out of the "antique road show fairy tale"... Comes complete with one of a kind John Broadwood antique piano from london, a cute family of racoons that lives in the yard under the gazebo, and a decent empty lot next to it that's currently used as parking for the inn, big enough to build another small house on... If anybody is interested, the owner is trying to sell it, including the piano and most of the furniture for $700,000+ as a private home... "the tudor inn"...

For a moment when she told me, the Bostonian Seattlite / closet rustic eclectic quaint & ornate furniture lover in me was thinking, "$700,000?? That's daaam cheap!!!"

A, i fully realized that. i didn't say that i was $100,000 dollars richer.

the flip side of that, A & e, is that we DID buy a house in 2000 for $92,000, put about $20k-30k into it, and just sold it for $175,000. that felt good.

'course then we turned around and bought an almost-livable new house for $170,000. it needs a lot more than $20k-$30k.

sigh.

Good point Steven. I have several friends that bought relatively inexpensive homes in the late 90's and have moved 2-3 times over the past 5-6 years, each time moving up. Now they are all in nice $500k homes that they only could afford because of the equity from rising values in those more modest homes. Their mortgage isn't any smaller but their utility bills, insurance, etc are all much higher. Should a family with combined income just over $100k be in a house that big? Even with a 30 year fixed mortgage rate that's a lot of house to pay for if there's a hiccup anywhere along the line.

Knowing several real estate agents I get grief for my beliefts but, to me, real estate is just a roof over your head until you own rental property which provides an income. Flipping homes can be profitable if you time it correctly, but it holds risks much greater than the stock market. For one it's not an asset easily made liquid.

Now television shows are giving everyone the impression that if they dump $20k into their house on a poorly done remodel they can get that back 2-3 times in selling price. I'm putting money into fixing my home up because I want to live in a nice home and could care less about selling for big profits in the near term.

Real estate will always make money, it just depends on who owns it when it does.



Love that saying.

Do you own any rental property, A? Good points about flipping -- man, that is just way harder and more complicated than the TV shows indicate.

yeah, i've thought about that steven. i like my house and my neighborhood though. it's just my wife and i, and i like the idea of living in a small house 1100sqft finished, 2br, 1bath. that could change in the future though.

interesting clip, A. I watched it.

$206,000 Milwaukee.

eeesah proyecht mang!

Hey A

I got no problem with HELOC's. Why would you want your equity tied up in a house where it gains no interest and if you ever really need it you can't get it? If the market crashes and you scramble to try to get that equity out of the house it will never happen and you will be jumping out the window. Why not pull it out when things are good and you can and put it somewhere easily liquidated? Besides your mortgage interest is tax deductible. The important point to be made, however, is the cash you pull out must be reinvested not consumed.

Are housing valued skewed by rich investors?

When enough rich people buy and don't actually keep a property, usually condos for its use (don't live in it), but instead just hold onto it, keep it mint, and then resell it... then the market rate is actually wrong... you have empty condos sitting all over the city not being used...

The three most important things to remember about real estate are,
location, location, location.

Real estate won't always make money. My parents home has lost almost a quarter of its value over the last three years due to Michigan's economic decline. Optimists of course will say that population pressure will eventually turn things around, but in the rust belt people have been waiting for decades for that to happen.

janosh, there are risks in every investment. i don't think anyone here assumes that real estate won't always make money. it has proven, over time, that it is one of the safer investments though.

Totally agree, just thought I would throw a note of caution into the what sometimes like irrational optimism about the housing market. In my office, we have two groups: people who can't afford homes that are convinced that there is a housing bubble, and those who bought before they became prohibitively expensive - their opinion without exception is that we the rate of appreciation will slow, not decline.

I'm in LA, and would buy except for the fact that I would be paying a mortgage of $1500 more in mortgage than my rent is now for the privilege of living in the same one bedroom apartment that I currently occupy. That's a lot of money that can be put in diversified investments, no matter what the potential tax advantages to having a mortgage might be. It would take a meteoric rise in 1 bedroom condo values to make a mortgage pencil out.

I paid too much for my house and spent way too much more remaking it the way I want it to be. And it's still not finished (master bedroom is stripped to studs and bathroom is gutted) so it's not even saleable right now.

However: the remodelling I did is good enough that unless things turn way south we shouldn't have any problem selling it and at least breaking even. But the spiritual rewards of it as my home are far more important on a daily basis to me than the thought of it as an investment. And isn't that what we architects are supposed to be selling?!?

ha. i'm so self-centered that when i showed liberty my house this weekend and pointed to all the things we think are crappy about it (e.g., the barnwood bathroom and kitchen), i didn't even know that she was still deep in her remodel. (in my head, lb, your house is that great sitting room with the cool sofa and big art and the bonus windows under the double-hungs.)

good luck, lb!

Steven, compared to the squalor in which we lived for five years during our last remodel - uninsulated plywood over future doors, a 3' square hole in the dining room to the basement that I could sit and count the mice coming to and fro through, washing dishes in the basement, making dinner on a hot plate next to the table saw - we are now living like royalty.

I should also add to the location question: I paid too much for my house because it is a four block walk into a small cool commercial district and has a lot of families nearby. Location truly is a good investment. In which case Steven your house is a treasure: walking from your private quiet court directly onto the street with the hip restaurants and clothing soters and cafes and of course the piercing parlor: what could be better?!?

Just so people are aware the idea of flipping houses by renovation is really not realistic. Its not the added or perceived value of the renovation that helps flip the house, so its not hte lipstick and boob job that you give teh house to improve it . Its generally the market demand for the housing in general ie supply and demand.

Its fine to renovate and live in it but the idea of flipping through renovating can really only happen in a bull housing market.

Interested in the next wave of reality TV shows when people will do anything to sell their house when the market levels off or tanks like it has started in the east.

and i should probably clarify, since 'flipping' came up after my comment about renovating and selling our last house, that we lived in the house for 6 yrs while we renovated it and only sold it because we needed a house with a more (potential) bedrooms. it was hard because, with each house we went visited we asked each other 'do we like it more than the house we have now?' and usually answered negative.

we are happy with what we made on that house, though.

And your new house is awesome, Steven. Really unique and tons of potential. It will be a hard one to give up too if the time ever comes.

Actually not quite, whistler -- lots of money is made is bear housing markets as well, where investors are able to purchase property at proportionately lower prices. Sale price may be apparently lower than in a bull market, but similar profits can be taken.

As far as the market "tanking" to the point where the type of panic sales you're predicting would occur -- I don't see that happening as a widespread rule. Yes, in the higher profile areas, but one thing about the housing bubble, some areas were definitely bubblier than others.

I'm never leaving Texas. Ever.

on a walk today down to my local garden store, I picked up a few flyers for some of the nicest houses in the 'hood that are for sale. 4 br 5 ba craftman (1920s) on 1/4+ acre for $624k! In LA this won't even buy a fixer 2br in a marginal 'hood with no yard. Gotta love Minneapolis!