My commute, which was only for meetings at HQ even before COVID, takes me right past this out-of-place mini-mansion.
Three car garage in a neighborhood where most homes don’t even have a carport.
Did you accidentally drop a zero? Because a 14-foot wide lot would be ridiculously hard to build on or live in.
Here’s a decidedly unimpressive million dollar home in my old neighborhood.
A few years ago, I saw a home like this listed for close to 4 million. The two differences were the 4 million dollar home was on narrow but really deep plot of land, and the area was zoned for high-rise apartment buildings. The real estate ads on that one barely mentioned the house , it was all about the zoning and the size of the building you would be allowed to put up on the lot.
Meanwhile, if you head east you can get this lovely 2 bedroom 1 bath Craftsman in East Sacramento for only $925k
It’s in the same neighborhood that was heavily featured in the film Lady Bird. The “blue house” prominently featured in that film, just 4 blocks away, is not on the market but has an estimated value of $1.6 million.
Down in Beaumont, TX, a million bucks can buy an actual mansion, complete with servants’ quarters. Full disclosure: I know the sellers.
In the suburbs east of Sacramento, you can get a McMansion, but it will be a longer commute if you work in the city.
I want to see more places like that one. Not how little, but how much. Those are fun.
Nope, it’s a town (row) house.
Detached houses in Toronto don’t exist under $1M, so you are looking at a semi-detached, town house, or condo.
Here in the slums of Somerville you get slightly more for $1M, but not much. I’m right on the border with Cambridge and our 3 bedroom 1000 sq ft condo would go for a bit less than that. But brand new places with slightly more square footage go for $1.2M or more.
Where I moved from three years ago, Santa Cruz County CA, a million dollars is an entry-level home. If you get 3 beds 2 baths, it is a run down mess.
Here in Western MA, that will get you a house big enough for a small orphanage, with a swimming pool.
In my area, $1,000,000 officially now buys you a below average house.
Wow. And I thought prices here were out of control.
I looked at Zillow for my hometown here in flyover land, and $949, 900 gets you a 10 bed/4 bath, 4700 square foot house:
Probably cost a fortune to heat.
A bit more gets this 5 bed/4 bath 4200 square foot home on a better lot. Looks like a nicer place, too:
I know someone who bought a 5 bedroom, 5 bath home over 5000 sq ft for about 550k recently.
Close to 20 years ago I was looking at moving to Fayetteville, AR and looking at the home I could buy for 300-400k and they were mansions and I decided to turn the job down because I wasn’t sure how I could go from a 5000 sqft brick home on 10 acres to a condo in the bad part of town in Santa Barbara, CA (also known as back home).
Checking now it seems that a million in Fayetteville will get you apparently . . . nothing. All I could find was this home for $600k and this one for $1.3mm with nothing inbetween.
Yeah, I laughed when I thought of the notion of a ‘Million Dollar Mansion’ in Toronto. The average price of a detached house in Toronto is $1.75 million.
That’s a classically beautiful old house of the era, completed in 1913, so it was probably started the same year the Titanic was brand new and started on its ill-fated maiden voyage. Lots of space and oozing with character! No doubt the walls are all plaster and lathe, which has a great effect on acoustics. The price is unbelievable. A house like that, with that kind of land, would easily be $5 to $10 million in Toronto, depending on exact location.
In fact, detached houses are approaching twice that in the city proper, and “don’t exist under $1M” is pretty much true for all the surrounding burbs in the Greater Toronto Area. And in fact that $1M for a small 2-bedroom townhouse isn’t even in a particularly good area. A few decades ago it was pretty run-down and has in recent years started to become gentrified, but not really my idea of a great neighbourhood. To be fair, I’m not really that familiar with it aside from having driven through it at times.
One thing I always reflect on these days is that after I retired, I eventually sold my place in the city and moved way out to one of the distant suburbs. My sole objective was to find a decent place to live, and a rental seemed like a good bet. But good rentals were hard to find, even then, so my next objective was to find a place to buy in a nice neighbourhood at a low price, which was realistic because it was so distant from the city proper.
The point here is that this was intended to be a cheap, decent place to live, not an investment. But the neighbourhood seemed to be growing and during my time here in less than a decade, two new schools and lots of new shopping areas have sprung up, and new construction has been going as fast as they can build 'em. When I had the property appraised recently, to my complete astonishment it had more than tripled in value in some nine years! Pretty damn good for a non-investment. Yay for real estate!
10 beds and 4 baths sounded like an odd ratio; I thought the bigger homes tended to have a bed:bath ratio of no more than 2:1 and usually closer to 1:1. So I clicked through to the listing, and it’s a 4-plex, not a house. Makes sense now: 4 attached units, one bath each, 2 with 2 beds and 2 with 3 beds. So actually pretty economical to heat.