New Home Pricing

[Sal]

Sad thing about quality Ag land that gets developed: it'll never again go under the plow.

Some blighted cities are actually returning land to farming.

 

[twocorgis]

My house is earmarked for my kids. A significant part of the real estate market is being bought up by absentee landlords.
I can't tell you how many times I've had real estate people cold call me on the cell. Or send me texts. Or send me emails. All to buy my house. One guy was talking to me one day, and I said to him, "I could sell my house, but I couldn't afford to live anywhere else!"
I have no interest in moving to another state away from my family, just so I can buy another house at this age. I'm all about passing along the generational wealth, since basically I had none growing up.
All the new construction around here is McMansions and expensive townhomes.

No Levittowns anymore.

The cheap Levitt house that I grew up in (1/4 acre plot, single story cape, built on a concrete slab) now has a Zillow estimate of almost a million dollars, despite not being substantially changed since my folks sold it in 1986.

17 Wakefield Ave, Port Washington, NY 11050 | Zillow

17 Wakefield Ave, Port Washington NY, is a Single Family home that contains 1383 sq ft and was built in 1949.It contains 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.This home last sold for $725,000 in August 2019. The Zestimate for this Single Family is $977,600, which has increased by $14,119 in the last 30...

www.zillow.com

And folks buy them, bulldoze them, and replace them with McMansions that take up the whole quarter acre. It's nuts.

 

[Midnight Toker]

The cheap Levitt house that I grew up in (14 acre plot single story cape built on a concrete slab) now has aa Zillow estimate of almost a million dollars, despite not being substantially changed since my folks sold it in 1986.

17 Wakefield Ave, Port Washington, NY 11050 | Zillow

17 Wakefield Ave, Port Washington NY, is a Single Family home that contains 1383 sq ft and was built in 1949.It contains 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.This home last sold for $725,000 in August 2019. The Zestimate for this Single Family is $977,600, which has increased by $14,119 in the last 30...

www.zillow.com

And folks buy them, bulldoze them, and replace them with McMansions that take up the whole quarter acre. It's nuts.

I grew up in a Levitt home myself. A rancher in Bowie, Md where my mother still lives. Thankfully, being in a regulated Chesapeake runoff area, only a certain % of a property can be an impervious surface/structure…so no leveling of any Levitt homes in Bowie. Despite that, and given it’s ideal location right between DC/Balt/Annapolis, with upgraded kitchen and bathrooms (and a den addition) many original homes are still selling for $700,000+. I think my parents paid $48,000 for it in 1974. In 62-65 when they were new they started at $16,000.

They are actually well built homes, what made them cheap was that Levitt also was his own materials supplier and built them assembly line style. He also made out in Bowie which once had ultra rich soil from 200 years of being a Mecca for horse breeding/farming. Several Triple Crown winners came out of the old Bowie stables. Levitt scraped up and sold all that fertile soil, leaving hard clay surfaces in most yards!

Belair Stable Museum | Bowie, MD - Official Website

Beginning in the late 1740s, Governor Samuel Ogle and his brother-in-law, Colonel Benjamin Tasker, imported a number of Thoroughbred horses, including the incredible Selima, to Belair.

www.cityofbowie.org

 

[tonepoet]

The other sad thing is builders aren’t building stand alone starter homes. Either it’s going to be McMansions or multi-condos. It used to be there were neighborhoods chock fully of 2-3 bedroom affordable ranches. No more.

HeyMikey,
Absolutely true here in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one is building 1500 sq ft single stories any longer. The "small" single stories are now 2700 sq ft or larger.

 

[tonepoet]

CA still offers a lot in terms of climate and scenery, but the quality of life otherwise has degraded to the point of being almost unrecognizable when compared to how it was back during the 1950s-1970s. This state is definitely no longer "middle-class-friendly" the way it once was.

So true!!

I moved to California in 1978 and lived in San Francisco between 1979 and 2000. My first apartment in SF was a studio with all utilities paid at $150 a month. An inflation calculator puts that to $600 in today's dollars. Today's average rent there in SF for a studio is now $2,180.

And the quality of life there is much degraded. I wouldn't live there again.

 

[tonepoet]

This is what the farm I grew up on is today. This is literally the same address and this is on the hill by where the barn was.

GAD,

I was born and raised about 5 miles north of Detroit. Up until I was 5 years old there was a barn at the end of our street. The neighborhood I grew up in was once a dairy farm.

A Silicone Valley group of billionaires has purchased 52,000 acres of grazing land here just south of me and they are planning on build a new city there.

 

[tonepoet]

In Portland, developers are buying up really nice old houses, tearing down the houses and surrounding trees, then building McMansions to the edges of the property lines. It's sickening to watch

This is the trend in suburban Detroit, as well. In the neighborhood I grew up in the average house was 1000 sq ft on a 40' x 100' lot. Those are getting torn down and developers are building 2 and 3 story houses nearly as wide as the lot with an attached garage in front so that they no longer need a driveway going into a garage behind the house and putting 1 million+ prices on them.

 

[tonepoet]

Poet, what part of CA are you talking about?

Chazmo,

Northern Bay Area between San Francisco and Sacramento.

 

[tonepoet]

A significant part of the real estate market is being bought up by absentee landlords.

This is a huge factor. I wish single family homes could be off-limits to corporate absentee landlords and buyers.

 

[Minnesota Flats]

And the quality of life there is much degraded. I wouldn't live there again.

I won't even go to SF anymore, much less live there.

Lived in SF from 1971-1975 and in the East Bay from 1967-1970. It was then nothing like it is now.

My first apartment in SF was a studio with all utilities paid at $150 a month.

Split a $180/month, 3 BR flat near 5th and Geary with 2 roomates and other flats in the Sunset and panhandle areas for similar rent. The panhandle was sketchy at night, as were places like Fillmore, Haight, Hunters Point, Tenderloin and parts of the Mission, but the rest of it was pretty much no worries. And car burglary wasn't off the charts just about everywhere as it is now. And "flash-mob" ransacking of stores was unheard of.

 

[tonepoet]

The panhandle was sketchy at night, as were places like Fillmore, Haight, Hunters Point, Tenderloin and parts of the Mission, but the rest of it was pretty much no worries. And car burglary wasn't off the charts just about everywhere as it is now.

I lived in San Francisco 1/2 block from the Panhandle for 8 years (1979-1987) on Central near Masonic and Fell. Used to take walks at night without a worry. Then I lived off Silver Ave near McLaren Park a few years. No worries. I last lived along Ocean Avenue and was mugged at gunpoint for the $9 I had on me. That was the end of me walking at night. Left SF in 2000 and wouldn't even think of living there again.

 

[jp]

In Portland, developers are buying up really nice old houses, tearing down the houses and surrounding trees, then building McMansions to the edges of the property lines. It's sickening to watch.

So true. Or they buy smaller houses like ours, do the magical makeover and relist them for 250K more.

 

[Ross]

Sad thing about quality Ag land that gets developed: it'll never again go under the plow.

That will a big issue in the long term. In eastern Canada (Ontario & Quebec) the best ag land is along the St Lawrence River and lower Great Lakes. These areas are the most populous and are increasing in pop size.

 

[davismanLV]

I just checked the house I lived in from age 3 to 12. It was in Woodland Hills, CA so the San Fernando Valley. My parents bought it new in 1957. Only 1400 sq. ft., with 3 small bedrooms and 2 baths. So Redfin has it listed HERE if you want to see it. Cute little ranch house. Redfin current estimate is $1.2 million. Who is buying these again??

 

[GAD]

I just checked the house I lived in from age 3 to 12. It was in Woodland Hills, CA so the San Fernando Valley. My parents bought it new in 1957. Only 1400 sq. ft., with 3 small bedrooms and 2 baths. So Redfin has it listed HERE if you want to see it. Cute little ranch house. Redfin current estimate is $1.2 million. Who is buying these again??

I know people around Silicon Valley a year or two out of college making $200k/year in IT. My daughter's current boyfriend (24) is a developer for Amazon in NYC and makes $140k.

 

[Default]

Each kid is going to inherit a house, at least that is the plan of my ex and myself.
I was expecting my kids to be doing better than I was, career-wise, but that's another topic.

 

[bobouz]

Growing up in the LA area in the ‘50s & ‘60s (Pasadena), I couldn’t imagine a better place to live. Baseball, sunshine, cars, girls, the beach - who could ask for more? But as 1969 & my first year of college rolled into view, through the smog I often couldn’t even see the San Gabriel mountains that I’d enjoyed as a kid, and they were only a mile away. Riding my motorcycle, I’d periodically have to pull over because my eyes were watering & burning so badly from the pollution. I left there in ‘71, realizing that a multitude of greed-fueled agendas were sacrificing quality-of-life markers on a regular basis. After a few periods of thoughtful renewal, we have now unfortunately regressed & reached a point where we’re left with something more akin to a Mad Max landscape in many of our urban areas. It’s pretty sad to do the comparison, when you can actually remember what quality urban environments were like at one time.

 

[Maguchi]

One of the bigger segments of the population the baby boomers are starting to get older. It'll probly be a few more years yet, but as they pass away it should free up a lot of properties. In my suburban neighborhood an older gentleman just passed away. Speculators bought his house, tore down all but one wall and are building a much larger McMansion that will price out at double what the property could've sold for when the speculators bought it. As older people start to pass away in larger numbers and larger numbers of properties are available, hopefully supply and demand will dictate less expensive smaller, middle class homes.

 

[JohnW63]

"The other sad thing is builders aren’t building stand alone starter homes."

There is a reason, in many cases. The property alone costs a lot now and the building materials have gone way up. Add those two things and even a small house probably costs the builder 150K. Add the labor and permits to that. Do you want to make 10K a house for all that or do want to make 100K for all that work?

Some one mentioned " Maybe in the Mojave desert.." Not really. My brother lives in a 900 sq ft house built in the 70s in a pretty cheap manner. ( The developer was well known for building to code but just barely and using scraps from one house in the next one. ) and it could go for over $300 now.

If we never move, our kid can continue living in our mother-in-law house ( 900sqft and a garage ) for free. He gets the front house when were gone. I don't know how kids out of college can afford anything.

 

[davismanLV]

The developer was well known for building to code but just barely and using scraps from one house in the next one. ) and it could go for over $300 now.

So $300K?? or what....