Monday, November 07, 2005
This Doesn't Surprise Me
On my recent trip to the Los Angeles-area, my first-ever, I asked the driver of the shuttle who took us from our hotel to our conference site, how much the homes we were seeing then might cost. They were one-story slab homes that were nice. In my neck of the Cincinnati suburbs, they would have gone for about $80,000.00. His answer, confirmed by another driver later, was that in SoCal, the selling prices would be about $500,000.00. People who move to the Midwest from California and are able to sell their former homes, pocket quite a bit of cash. They buy larger homes with more yard at a fraction of what it would cost them back there. That's why this doesn't surprise me.
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3 comments:
Oh boy...you still don't know the half of it. :) On our street...perhaps five miles east of where your conference was held....our quiet surburban street of pleasant, 1,900-ish sq ft 40-year-old homes...a house at the end of the street, a fixer-upper with just a basic yard (grass, some shrubs), sold six weeks ago for $700,000.
It's positively crazy. Aside from the purchase price, property taxes, for instance, are based on your purchase price. Then there's insurance, which is calculated on replacement cost.
When two conditions are met...our daughter graduating from high school in three years, and my husband no longer being in his present engineering job....we will necessarily move out of state, just due to financal common sense.
But we will do so quite happily, and will likely move near my daughter and her husband in Portland, OR.
Deborah:
After having been there for all of three days, I think I know why people want to live there. The weather is spectacular! I had never experienced 97-degrees and no sweat!
But the price one pays is enormous.
I felt like a hayseed mentioning this, in a way. So, I'm glad that you wrote what you did.
Most of the houses in my neighborhood go for about $150K to $180K. Based on what you're telling me, I'm thinking that in SoCal, they might bring in $850K and up. Amazing!
Thanks for reading and leaving the comments.
Mark
Mark----Southern California is a desert. A Fall day, about 80 to 85 degrees and low humidity, feels like perfection.
Yes, the desert-air weather here feels wonderful. I am a native Southern Californian, and likely don't even appreciate our weather. But then again, Fall here is quite different from most of the country.
I would love to live each October where the leaves change colors and the air is crisp.
But alas, for the money, our homes are much smaller, and everything costs a fortune here. Southern California is not for the poor, and the middle class is moving away, too.
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