In Utah County the cheapest “House” for sale is 600 square feet, 2 bed, 1 bath, at $300k.
So at current interest rate it would be $1,800 a month mortgage(assuming you put the 60k down payment! A decent amount more if you do 3% down.)
The cheapest condo/town in utah valley is 205k, 1,100 square feet, on a 400 square foot lot. But due to a $500 HOA fee the monthly cost is still 1,700 a month (assuming 20% down).
With 3.5% down they’d both be closer to 2.1k +PIMI.
So yeah, how is where you live doing?
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I’m in Ashburn, VA. I just looked at Zillow and saw that the cheapest single family home right now is $625k for 2060 sqft. If you have a credit score >719 and put $100k (~16%) down, it’s only $4438/month according to their estimates.
So my wife and I live in an apartment with no kids or pets, and we both work a lot… Maybe one day we can afford a townhouse? I just found a decent looking one that’s only $450k so $3200/month…
Good reminder to never move their.
Explains why my rich brother in law lives in Charlottesville
Fairfax isn’t any better. We looked at a 1625sq ft here that sold for $800k. And it was from the 60s and old as hell.
Here in London, you can easily find for £120k a nice 100m² garage without plumbing outside of a busy hospital where passerbys go to smoke and urinate.
I had to laugh at someone in our office who found a listing for a fairly nice house for 20k.
It was indeed a nice house. Unfortunately the listing was for the parking space in front of it.
sounds right, sounds sadly right
You wish it was a 100m2 garage for that price!
The cheapest home I could find in my hometown of Vancouver, BC is:
1 bedroom, 1 bath, 696 sq/feet 398,000
Just to point out, everyone else is talking about detached single family homes. The person from Vancouver gave a tiny apartment and it’s still worth nearly half a million.
The cheapest detached home for sale is $1,350,000, and it’s about as far away from downtown you can get while still being in the city of Vancouver.
Vancouver’s housing is out of control.
Has that “absentee owner” law (or whatever the name is) taken effect yet? Do you think it will help?
Nothing will help unless they ban the ability to own multiple properties. Policies such as the empty homes one have intentional loopholes
The current government is trying to add things fairly quickly, the absentee owner law is in effect, and they did just add another 20% ‘flipper’ tax. As mentioned though, people still own way too many houses. My current landlord owns 7.
To add to this, they’re banning mass AirBNB rentals which should help. But yes, banning ownership of more than 2 properties would surely help most.
Just wanted to quickly point out - there’s likely nothing for 1.35 million in Vancouver. There are in greater Vancouver though.
And yes, 100% out of control.
Yeah, actually found a detached 2 bedroom. It was so far south it was practically on the Fraser River, but still in Vancouver.
For more fun, calculate how much money you would have to make to meet the rule of having your mortgage only cost 30% of your take home pay!
To buy a home with a 2k mortgage and keep that rule, you’d need a TAKE HOME pay of nearly 80k, so easily needing 6 figures gross pay to afford these two homes while still keeping this rule.
By that calculation I am incredibly lucky (UK home owner). My mortgage is 16% of my take
I’m not saying I would kill to have my mortgage be 16% of my take home pay.
But if the military could guarantee it, id consider it.
155.000€ for new 5 bedroom 200+ m2 duplex in my small town in Spain.
No HOAs! supermarkets and schools are in walking distance ;)
Cheapest is around 30K, but why bother?
Do you get fiber Internet? Asking for a friend ;)
Yup, 700/700Mb. Also wimax but that only gets up to 25Mb
🚩
Here in a small village in the Netherlands the cheapest is 315k euro for 65m2 and 2 bedrooms
Godverdomme. Right behind my house also Dutch village they built a new building with apartments, 240-270k for 35m2, they’re literally shoeboxes.
Well, there goes my dream retirement plan.
Here in Victoria BC the cheapest detached house is just shy of $1m cad. What a shithole
Like $15k if you want a total gut & remodel
Edit: found one for $10k. Fun. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1205-Mill-St-Pittsburgh-PA-15221/11379395_zpid/?utm_medium=referral
“EXPLORE the UNTAPPED POTENTIAL”, I love the agents unyielding optimism.
Does that count though? If it isn’t even legal to live in yet, I think we should add rebuilding costs to be accurate. I could afford that $10,000 with help from the bank, but wouldn’t have the first idea how much it would cost me to make it livable. Can you still get a mortgage or house loans on materials to rebuild?
The OP said “house”. Interpret that however you’d like I guess. If you bought this place for $10k in cash, I don’t know who exactly would stop you from clearing out a room and living in it while working on it.
You can get a loan for just about anything from the bank. You don’t even have to be very specific about what you’re using it for. All they care about is credit history, what interest rates they’re giving you, length of loan, blahblahblah
Holy shit. How does that have a positive value? Still, Pittsburgh… hm…
Hyup. I was born and raised here, and love the city to death.
Wilkinsburg is a bit of a strange part of town. It’s one of a few neighborhoods that have resisted annexation for a century plus. Just look at a map of Pittsburgh and you’ll see big empty holes (literally mount Oliver is completely surrounded by the city). This results in some weird circumstances, wilkinsburg has really high taxes, shit schools, and is one of the rougher parts of town.
On the other hand, I love where I’m at in the city, I got a beautiful 1800 sq ft 4BR home built in 1890 along the river. I can see the water from my front stoop. $160k, and I have a few roommates. Currently slowly renovating the place.
It is a bit ironic opening Instagram or something and seeing posts like “omg! Pittsburgh is so affordable, my rent is under $2k!!!” For those shitty “luxury” apartments going in all over the country. Meanwhile, my mortgage is $830 because I bought during covid.
I feel the creep and know the city isn’t gonna be affordable forever. Wages are still a bit shit around here.
600 square feet? What do you do with all the space? I can’t even conceive of having such a large house.
The house I live in is about the cheapest in my area that has an actual land deed. So it’s an effective minimum for a house in my city – smaller houses can’t get land deeds, so you can’t properly buy them. It costs about the equivalent of USD 150k.
I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The median salary is not so high here. So correcting for cost of living, that’s ‘something like’ the equivalent 600k in the USA.
The other catch is that the house is 2.3 meters wide and maybe 9 meters long (including the walls). That’s about 225 square freedom units. No yard in the front or back. Typically 2-3 families would live in a house like this, but it’s just my wife and I, because I need half the space for my business. My previous residence was smaller, about 2 meters by 4.5 meters. The roof fell on me once, but otherwise it was quite acceptable. That cost about USD 5k to build (building only – not land price), but you can’t legally buy or sell it.
Home ownership is basically impossible here except through inheritance, or owning a successful business (which is quite a battle in a cost-driven market). Even then, most families get a small room, with no ownership paperwork or land deed – the theoretical value of these is about 60k USD based on the rent vs. value of other buildings. So, equivalent to ~240k in the USA.
The other other catch is that bank interest rates are very high – and unless you are already rich, chances are you cannot get a loan. So typically buying a home is done in cash. Some people who work at big companies with upper middle class salaries have been able to get loans in recent times too.
Off in the countryside, you can still get a decent plot of empty land for ~30k USD and build your own home (10k to 200k depending on whether it’s a hut or a villa). However, there are basically zero employment opportunities out there, and you’re far from advanced hospitals and so on. Basic services are available, roads and power are OK, and it’s quite lovely. If you’re in good health, know how to catch fish, and speak Vietnamese, it’s actually a pretty good good life.
Anyway there are many things about life here that are really great (I mean, I chose to immigrate), but the path to home ownership is brutal. I thought it was brutal in North America but really I had no idea.
600 squared freedoms are 55 communists squared, in case anyone else from the civilised world was wondering. So not very big.
I have yet to meet a square communist!
I tried:
Wow. To be fair, most of the communists I know are less handsome than that. They look like maybe… somewhat better than average middle-aged people? They also only occasionally stare off to the horizon, far ahead and slightly to the left, with appropriate literature held tightly against their chests :P
I like that black shirt, I’d buy that in a second. We get some really nice propaganda posters here, but often the message is less dramatic than the artwork. Usually it’s stuff like ‘don’t drink and drive’, ‘try to eat less salt’, and ‘spitting in public is gross, stop doing it please’. Once I could read them, I discovered most of them were… surprisingly wholesome :D
This is for an area of western, suburban Tokyo. Edit: most are going to be around 1.25+ hours into Shinjuku involving transfers and up to a 20 minute walk to the nearest station.
In USD terms, around $76,000. 52.x square meters 3 rooms, bath, dining+kitchen (so one room is presumably getting used as the living room). Another few hundred a year in maintenance/condo fees. But it’s in a building from 1976 which is before the latest major earthquake law revision and I would absolutely not live there (property can appreciate in Japan, but houses are not seen as investments and lose value really quickly).
Poking around, there are freestanding houses as well in that range, but they cannot be rebuilt so you’re stuck with the existing structure (I don’t know to what degree one could legally “Ship of Theseus” the thing; interior renovation is fine). This is mostly due to a change in law requiring at least a 4-meter-wide (IIRC) road connecting to the property (and mostly for emergency services access). You can buy these on the cheap but it’s because they’re not a long-term solution and you’ll be stuck holding the bag on worthless land to all except maybe a neighbor who might want to buy it (but if it’s for sale now, they don’t).
There are actually a surprising number of buildings after 1981 (latest major earthquake law revision, basically required for mortgage + insurance), but a lot of them are in areas with heavy restrictions (landscape laws, height laws, aviation laws (I have no idea what that one means; maybe it’s in a flight path (noisy) or has some additional height/light restrictions?)), etc.
The search site I used doesn’t have any good way of searching for used homes without restrictions built after 1981 for comparison and I got tired of clicking.
Prices jump a lot within a 20-minute walk of the closest station; most people don’t want to live further.
Poking around, there are freestanding houses as well in that range, but they cannot be rebuilt so you’re stuck with the existing structure
Could you link an example or something on whatever Japanese zillow is? Because this seems absolutely intriguing to me, if only to see what it looks like.
Suumo.jp Is probably the most popular.
Thanks for the link, definitely an interesting time browsing. And sorry to keep bothering you about Japanese real estate, I’m sure you have more interesting things to think about, but looking at it, the offerings on the “under 20 million yen” page just seem absurdly too good to be true. Like, looking at something like This, 1100 square feet, seemingly fairly recent renovations and built in '94, parking for 3 cars, and only 35 minute walk from the station, yet it’s listed for 11.7 million yen/78k usd? Like, from an American perspective, it looks like some Craigslist scam to get your banking info. Is there something getting lost in between cultures? Is the Japanese market really just that much cheaper?
Most people would consider a house that’s 30-40 years old at end-of-life. There are likely restrictions on the property about rebuilding or something as well; that’s usually the only time you see stuff that cheap.
35 minutes to the station is too far for most people as well (prices drop as soon as you hit 20, typically).
You wouldn’t have central heat/air (not a thing here), the insulation is probably very little, etc. That’s all still just normal here.
Most people would consider a house that’s 30-40 years old at end-of-life
That’s pretty interesting to me. The house I grew up in was built in the late 50s, as was the entire neighborhood, making it just under 40 years old by the time I was born, and it’s still there today, with the only major renovations being redoing the flooring and replacing appliances.
Is the shorter lifespan more of just a cultural thing, or is it a matter of how housing is built? Because I can certainly see the pricing if it’s the latter and it’s nearing the point of requiring major maintenance.
Post-war housing shortage led to tons of homes being slapped up quickly to deal with civilian homeless, returning soldiers/prisoners, and US troops. There were basically no standards (there were an absurd amount of homeless due to the firebombings and such) or building codes. Codes got stronger, but many houses were still poor quality (and burnt down often). Bonus fact: this is one reason there are such monocultures of certain trees in Japan; clear-cut to provide lumber and replanted with fast-growing trees for more lumber.
Secondarily, families were (and many still are) multi-generational. So, when a parent retires, the next generation will often take over and often knock down and rebuild. That’s becoming less of thing, but it still exists.
Finally, especially when there were few/no regulations, things burnt down a lot, particularly during winter (heating) and when an earthquake would strike. Better standards now, but this was true for quite a while.
So, generally, treat any home/condo you buy as a depreciating asset. The land may increase in value depending upon where it is. In rare cases, the building may as well, but I wouldn’t count on it.
That’s at least a very TL;DR version based on what I know. There may be more that I don’t know as well.
$200,000 for a 1 Bed 1 Bath with an hour and a half commute to the city. It’s a unit, so probably has a bunch of other fees attached for upkeep but they aren’t listed. Area is far away from necessary services, highly car dependent and notoriously crime ridden. The unit is run down and requires renovations.
Double that for a 2 Bed 1 Bath in a similar area.
$229k NZD for a 2 bed, 1 bath 80sqm slumlord rental in a shit neighbourhood in Christchurch, New Zealand
315k GBP for a 2br ‘period property’ (aka a disgusting dilapidated horder house with the energy efficiency of a tent)
Figure in another 100k and a year to fix it, due to how UK contractors work.
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Its all relative really, because we don’t experience extreme temperatures the smaller variations in temperature make a bigger difference to us. It might get up to 25 degrees on a typical summer day and as cold as -10 in winter, but the difference between a day for shorts and a day for a jumper could be only 3 or so degrees
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It does because energy is very expensive in the UK.
London? Or somewhere close?
This housing crisis won’t change until we start to move into politician’s lawns and garages.
For a “cheap “ suburb of Boston
- $580k for 1,038 sq ft 2 br on a 5,000 sq ft lot. The homes on this area were originally built as summer cottages so they’re going to be expensive to heat. Of 12 single family homes for sale, 7 are over $1M and one is in a different town
- $265k for a 1 br condo, 579 sq ft. The only feature listed is “private entrance”. Second cheapest is a new townhouse for $1.5M
