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Where Are America's Most Expensive Towns?
- floundy 2y agoThe national median home price in the US is $385k according to the most recent Redfin data point on 15 Sep. I find it very hard to believe that the "top 20 most expensive micropolitan areas" has 1/3 of the listed areas cheaper than the national median home price.
- mlhpdx 2y agoIsn’t the median price going to be heavily weighted by metropolitan prices since that’s where the vast majority of homes are located?
- chiefalchemist 2y agoIs that median value, or median price of recent home sales? And then what metric does the article use exaxtly?
- twoodfin 2y agoI was curious, too. It’s from the 2022 American Community Survey: https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/ownership/ https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio... It’s an owner-reported estimate of a hypothetical sale price.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoHaving done res real estate for a hot second... Owners *always* over-estimate the value of their homes. They always want to ask for too much. Sure, we hear of occasional up-bidding in hot markets but that's typically the exception.
- twoodfin 2y agoYes, I suspect if you were doing real research vs. clickbait for Lending Tree you’d find some way to calibrate owner estimates to actual sale prices & adjust for that bias.
- twoodfin 2y agoThe data set being used clocks the median value of an owner-occupied housing unit @ $282k: https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/ownership/ https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
- foundart 2y agoThe NYT article is based on https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/most-expensive-towns-in-america/ https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/most-expensive-tow...
- mlhpdx 2y agoSix of the top 50 are in Oregon, which is a bit of a surprise to me. But then again perhaps not — the small town lifestyle here is pretty compelling.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago> Vineyard Haven, Mass., Jackson, Wyo., and Breckenridge, Colo., are the towns with the most expensive real estate in the U.S. These are resort towns. Rich people buying larger (than typical for the area) 2nd, 3rd or more homes. If such activity is the majority of the sales then numbers are going to skew up. That doesn't mean there aren't more reasonably priced homes. It just means those transactions aren't happening as often, that those people aren't leaving, that similarly income'd people are moving in. Best I can tell the data being used is biased in a sense and perhaps not reflective of the whole of those markets.
- m463 2y ago> These are resort towns. ... numbers are going to skew up I would assume real estate prices for ski town would be really different and scale with the walking distance to a chair lift.
- theGnuMe 2y agoLol. You know nothing. There are NO reasonably priced homes in Jackson, Wyo. They have to import labor from Idaho Falls.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoThat might be true, but the article and the data doesn't say that. Instead it's biased in ways and it's important to be aware of that. Resort towns are not typical. The article might as well be titled "20 Outlier Housing Markets To Dilute the Housing Conversation." Regardless, importing labor is correlation. It simple means it's cheaper to bring in (temporary?) labor than to pay local rates. That may or may not be related (read: causation) to housing.
- theGnuMe 2y agoThe data? What are you talking about? Avg home price in jackson hole is $2M, median is $3M. Prices are $1000/sq ft, $2M/acre roughly.
- worstspotgain 2y agoQuick cheatsheet to the CoL crisis: Economic production requires capital and labor. If you own stock, you reap the returns from capital. If you own real estate, you reap the returns from labor. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. At one end of the spectrum, if there were no artificial housing supply restrictions, the returns from labor would go to the laborers themselves. At the opposite end, with a fully-controlled housing supply, all the income is extracted. The laborers' rent and rent-derived prices - all locally-provided products and services, a.k.a. non-tradeables - exactly equals their paycheck. Perfect camouflaged servitude.
- naveen99 2y agoAre the housing supply restrictions new since 2008 when the real estate bubble pop revealed an oversupply of housing ?
- worstspotgain 2y agoIn '08 people walked away from underwater mortgages. The market was already undersupplied and overpriced, the price inflation trajectory expectations were just exuberantly overshot. If you want to see a healthy housing market, look at pre-1970, or at (much of) Texas today.
- tomcam 2y ago20 most-expensive areas with population 10,000–50,000 Vineyard Haven, Mass. Jackson, Wyo. Breckenridge, Colo. Steamboat Springs, Colo. Hailey, Idaho Gardnerville Ranchos, Nev. Hood River, Ore. Ellensburg, Wash. Los Alamos, N.M. Astoria, Ore. Juneau, Alaska Fredericksburg, Texas Kill Devil Hills, N.C. Easton, Md. Sandpoint, Idaho Prineville, Ore. Ketchikan, Alaska Brookings, Ore. Sheridan, Wyo. Montrose, Colo.
- nunez 2y agoNot surprising, as all of these (except Los Alamos) are vacation towns.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoBreckenridge has a population above 10,000? Google says 4,917 as of 2022.