Here are the homes for sale in my zip code for between $550K and $650K:
Dallas, it would really depend on location. My hpuse wpuld be worth twice as much ten miles closer to the city center, in a. “nice” neighborhood: lots there are easily $600k. But in an puter ring suburb, the same money gets you a new McMansion with all the trimmings, and if you go out far enough, it’s sitting kn a fair bit of land.
In Colorado Springs:
A 6-bedroom, 4-bathroom, 4,101 sq. feet, for $553,500.
As mentioned in the other thread, our 1300 sqft bungalow, with two small bedrooms and one bathroom is currently appraised for over $500K. It sits on a standard 50x100 lot and has a one-car detached garage/shed. We live at the far southern edge of Portland proper. In some neighborhoods, $600K will buy you exactly zero. Contractors will snap up older houses for that amount, immediately knock them down and build much larger homes or rental buildings on the properties. Yeah, the housing market is nuts here.
As with most cities, there are less desirable neighborhoods, and prices go down the further out you go from city center.
Say, isn’t that ‘Realtor-Speak’ for “Its in a Flood Zone”?
It wouldn’t get my 1000 sq ft 2nd floor condo in a triple decker just outside of Harvard Square.
Torrance, California, Average 3 bedroom tract homes are going for over $600,000. About 1400 sq ft. or less.
Zillow estimates the family home’s selling price in Clairemont (San Diego) is $618,611. It has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a garage. It’s 1,288 square feet, and sits on a 6,300 square foot lot. It was built in 1960. So the price of Sanders’s house would almost buy a modest, middle-class, single-family tract home like ours, in a modest, middle-class neighbourhood in San Diego. (I really would like to sell it, but my sister refuses.)
Housing prices in my neighbourhood are all over the place. I live in a 3BR, 1BA, 1,090 sq. ft. house near the beach. Next door is a single-wide trailer. My home’s value has increased 74% since I bought it in 2003, so I could buy 3½ houses like mine for the value of Bernie’s house. OTOH, there are some beachfront houses in the $550K to $650K range. And then there are the posh neighbourhoods. Again, prices are all over the map; but I see some houses in the $2 million to $3 million range out on Birch Point.
I just saw an advertisement for a 6 bedroom 4 bath house with an inlaw suite in my area (west Georgia) for around half that. So, two of those.
Here at the far western limits of commutability to Seattle, $600K will get you a new, large home on a suburban lot, as long as you don’t have to be on the water. Mind, you’d have to take the ferry to Seattle, so I don’t recommend relying on that commute.
A large house, over 3000 sq. ft., a nice piece of property but a good hunk of it may be near vertical. It’s probably a McMansion built before the bubble burst and used to be valued higher than that. It won’t get you Bernie’s house on the shore, might be equivalent to some local lake homes.
In Toronto, US $600,000 would probably buy you an older bungalow in relatively poor condition or a nice condo row house or a very nice condo apartment (depending on the neighbourhood).
The only listings in the CAD $600k range in my area code are condo row houses (from realtor.ca).
If you want to live in the Cincinnati suburbs, you can get this baby (4,200 square feet), which comes with a country club membership. And at only 556K, there’s enough left over to hire a nanny.
And stop picking on Bernie. Any idea of the headaches involved in owning three homes? It must be awful. 
The median house price in my city is north of $700k. So it’d buy you less than that. I’d expect you’d get a reasonable three bedroom ranch or split level house for that price. Something built in the fifties, but recently remodeled so decent, would be about what you could expect.
I could buy 4 houses (almost 5) on my block in a suburb (which is technically inside city limits) of Columbus, OH. That would include at least 3BR/2BA each, garages, and finished basements on at least a couple of them. Yards pretty small- 6-8k sq ft. There are condos in certain parts of the city that go for 500-600 each though. I could definitely find a huge farm with a modern house or something else with a lot of land and mansion-like house for 600 grand within a reasonable distance.
US$600,000 might just buy my house, given the sad state of the CAN$ these days. It is assessed just under $800,000 in a near-in suburb (I can and regularly do walk the 4 miles to downtown). It is a semi-detached two-storey 1300 sq. ft. 4 BR house on a 2000 sq ft lot. Pleasant tree-lined street. A commuter train nearby gets you downtown in 9 minutes.
I went to Zillow and set my filter to $625k or less and got… nothing. Expanding the search area pulled up some older, 70s era apartments that have been converted to condos. Not recently updated either. This is a tough, tough town. We have a problem with people coming here to live in RVs because on the surface, it looks like a good option. Mild weather year round, and jobs are in decent supply. But the jobs are nothing that would allow you to save up for a down payment, or even a deposit on an apartment since the rental market is incredibly tight. If I had the cash flow right now, I’d buy homes to rent. I believe the vacancy rate is some small fraction of a percent. The vacation rentals business has pulled a substantial amount of the long-term rentals off the market.
There is no house you can get that cheap near where I live. You might be able to get a 1 BR or studio condo for that price, but nothing else. Detached Homes ore even Townhouses under $1M are unheard of. Of course, I live in the SF Bay Area, so I’m part of what got the OP going in the first place.
Within 10 miles of here only about 1% of listings are over $500,000. There is only one house in that price range within 5 miles of me: 3 bedroom, 3 bath, 3000 square foot house with in-law apartment, on a quarter acre waterfront lot with 100 feet of frontage on a modest sized lake. The asking price of $600,000 seems a great deal higher than similar houses on similar lots on the same lake, so I doubt they’re really serious about selling.
Going a little farther afield, there are certainly plenty of waterfront properties on the ocean or Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire that are that expensive and much more. I see a 14,000 sq ft house with 6 acres on Lake Winnepesaukee for the bargain price of $16,000,000.
Here in Tucson, a home around $600,000 would be rare and expensive. It would be large, with sweeping views of the city, with lots of land and at least one pool. For example, here is one for $550,000 with 6 bedrooms, 6 baths, about 5,599 sq ft, on 3.5 acres.