Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Realativity
This post started as a Thirteen, but I tuckered out after six. After I show you my offerings, I’ll open it up to discussion.
Here’s the question: depending upon where you look, how much real estate will one million dollars buy?
Answer below the cut . . .
$1,000,000 will buy
1. This 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 1746 sq ft home “conveniently located in central Maui.”
Price per sq ft: $573.
2. Nothing in Malibu Beach. Entry level in Malibu? For $1,599,999:
Beautiful completely remodeled 2 story fee simple at the popular county line surfing spot! 3 bedroom, 3 full bath + media room/office. Bright kitchen with granite countertops and new stainless steel appliances. Separate laundry & storage room. Attached 2 car garage, extra guest parking.
Square footage? Who knows, who cares. It’s Malibu!
3. A killer view in Manhattan:
At 950 sq ft and $1,000,000, this one clocks in at $1,053/sq ft. Amenities? Doorman, fitness center, pool, washer/dryer, dining (huh?), live work (double huh?) I can almost picture Carrie Bradshaw swooning in my arms.
(No, no wait! Samantha Jones. More age-appropriate and, as far as I could tell from the show, more fun.)
4. A 1250 sq ft condo on Nob Hill, in San Francisco.
To-the-studs renovation that retains much of the Victorian charm of the building! This two bedroom Nob Hill TIC won the lottery and is soon to be a condo. With over 1,250 SF, the renovation is all about the details. The kitchen has Sub Zero and Wolf appliances, and custom cabinets with self-closures. The floors are tongue-in-groove white oak w/radiant heat. Two fireplaces, independent parking, security system, laundry closet and a private back yard.
So much for the high end. What about Nowhere, USA? Say, for example, Sparks Nevada?
5. 4,283 sq ft, an acre of land, and a capital-K Kitchen:
Not bad, but I was expecting more for my million bucks. This is Nevada, for heaven’s sake. You should get your own dude ranch for living in Nevada.
Isn’t Tokyo supposed to be one of the priciest real estate markets in the world? A million dollars (103,071,530 yen) will almost buy you
6. This road, apparently.
Admittedly, it’s a very nice road. (There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.) And it comes with
24Hours man securitied
Good for living ( Abundant green )
86.58 sq.m 2Bedrooms apartment
Well maintenanced building
Panoramic Green View
5 minutes walk to HIROO station
I think I’d buy it just to be able to tell people I live near HIROO station. Hirooooo!
***
So: what would a million buy out in your neck of the woods?
D.
Here you can get a 2 bedroom calm, charming, small free-standing house with a large living/dining room (loft style) open to the patio with a nice garden. Close to one of towns on the city’s border. 1 bathroom, 1 small laundry room, open kitchen with central island. Total number of rooms – 4.5, 110 m2, for 1,250,000 CHF (with the drop of the $, it’s about $1.25 million) on a parcel of 400 m2.
Or a 5-room apartment for 920,000 Swiss Francs in a town away from the center, 123 m2, 3 bedrooms, equipped kitchen, fireplace, 2bathroom, small garden (60 m2), and 2 parking spaces. This one seems like a good deal! Better go make some phone calls!
lets see…according to homes.com, in the town over from mine, you can get four bedrooms, three and a half baths, and 4.12 acres. in my town, you get a pretty nice house but only 1.38 acres.
but this is just from one website…you can do ok though.
Depends upon the neighborhood, but using a range of $900K to $1.1M it looks like anything from 2 – 5 bedrooms, 1 – 3 bathrooms, 2000 – 4500 sq. ft, and lots that range from 1.000000001 – 2 x the sq feet of the building… It will usually get you a nice kitchen, at least one really nice bath, sometimes a master suite, usually a fireplace, occasionally a view, usually a desirable neighborhood.
At that price point, you’ve got to be wary of new construction; our next-door neighbors bought their house for just under $1M, and while it looks nice, a lot of it was done on the cheap… They moved here from the Bay Area, so for them $1M for that house seemed reasonable – for Seattle it was overpriced, and probably should have been priced more at $800K (and that’s without taking into account the shoddy workmanship).
The further north or south you go, the lots get bigger, starting at around an acre and running as high as 6 or 7 acres, and the houses get nicer.
I haven’t looked recently, but within walking distance of where I’m sitting right now, $1m will buy you a 2 bedroom 6th-10th floor 900-1000 sf apartment near the park.
3 km from here, it’ll buy you a bulldozer reno special on a standard 60 x 100 lot.
Out where we live and commute from, it’ll buy you a standard house on 2 acres. Go only 15 minutes further, and it will get you a standard house on 5 acres.
It’s quite a coincidence – I was just looking at real estate listings in Key West. For a cool mil you can get a pretty nice, small house or a very swanky condo.
I want the small, nice house.
Okay – I want more, but I’m dreaming big so as it is.
Around where I live (northeast PA, hour from Philly, hour and a half from NYC), a million buys a lot: Big house, pool, privacy.
Wow. Y’all live some expensive places. Here in the Des Moines metro, you can get a 6500 sq foot luxury home, on an acre of land, in a gated community.
http://www.iowarealty.com/buying/detail_ml.asp?list_numb=293542&rpp=12&page=4&low_list_price=900000&high_list_price=2500000&
Now, where we’re moving TO, well… you can buy this lot http://www.ftdodgemls.com/LandListing.aspx?M=IR0706006 and put this house on it – http://www.ftdodgemls.com/ResidentialHighlights.aspx?M=CB0803011
and still have money left over! 😉
You need to move to Iowa, Doug. Have you checked out the University of Iowa hospitals in Iowa City? I bet Karen could get great treatment there, and there’s also the Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota (a short, lovely drive from where we’re moving to).
Don’t let a little scalding summer and ice-crusted winter scare you off. 😉
Oh, one other thing about the real estate market in Seattle (in Seattle proper, at any rate)… Up until recently, if a house was priced reasonably for the neighborhood, the asking price was understood to be the starting point, not the desired end point. In the market of last year or the year before last, that asking price range of $900K – $1.1M represents something more like an actual price range of $950K – $1.2M.
Things have cooled off some, but not too much; in our neighborhood, the houses that aren’t moving are the ones that are priced too aggressively; the more sensible ones are still going pretty quickly.
A million doesn’t carry as much weight as it used to, it seems.
ps, that’s kind of alarming!
I usually just lurk but thought I’d let you know that a million can still go an awefully long way here on the east coast.
In our middle of nowhere village the most expensive house ever was a 5 bdroom 4 bath with built in pool. It went for 150,000. No, I have not forgotten any zeros.
If you want ocean front in the big city (Halifax is the biggest) you’ll be paying closer to that million, but you’ll still get something pretty spectacular. In fact, the tag line for the local lottery is “where a million dollars goes as far as a million should”.
(these days, that’s right into your gas tank)
Well, in the markets you’re considering, no – $1M isn’t peanuts, but it won’t buy you a mansion either.
The Seattle market is pretty alarming, even still. I have to admit, we probably wouldn’t have been able to buy our house without taking advantage of some of the gimmicks that led to the current lending meltdown.
We made a decent profit on our St. Louis house (for that market) when we moved; once we paid off our mortgage, we had enough left over to pay our moving costs, three months rent on a house in Seattle, and a couple month’s worth of cushion while I looked for work… and that was it.
Once we were financially stable and ready to buy*, our landlord wouldn’t let us break our lease. Faced with the prospect of almost double payments for four or five months, we opted for 2 loans: a 0% down mortgage and a totally bogus but somehow legal ‘refi’ at the same time that allowed us to stay just under the ceiling that would have required us to pay mortgage insurance. It was really the only way we could do it without liquidating retirement funds and whatnot.
*As it turned out, I got laid off a month after we bought our house. I was only out of work for a week, and wound up in a better position, but it made for a very tense month or so…
Hmm, apparently there’s nothing in my town worth $1M. For $599,000*, you can get this:
3864 square feet, on 1.070 acres of land.
____
* and that’s Canadian dollars, too.
It’s not a huge diff any more, Pat. That 599,000 is, as of this morning’s rate, 590,000 US.
Interesting place, Pat. Snowbound cabin with a portal to a tropical pad, pool included.
ps, that IS one of the more daunting aspects to the Seattle offers. But if we can sell our home here in a timely fashion, we shouldn’t be too bad off wherever we relocate to (provided it isn’t Tokyo or Manhattan).
Tam, as much as I would love to be neighbors with you, the scalding summers WOULD be a problem for Karen. And I hate to imagine her slipping in an icy parking lot or driveway. Sorry!
Canadacole, thanks for delurking! I wish more of my lurkers would delurk.
Dean: I realize that. It’s kind of a running joke among my cow-orkers these days, to tag “but that’s American dollars” on to anything we talk about related to the States, and then laugh becuase it’s close enough to par not to matter.
Doug
Snowbound cabin with a portal to a tropical pad, pool included.
Haven’t I told you that we Canadians are magic?
Pat, I thought that was leprechauns. Are you magic, too?
It’s a different kind of magic, but hell yes.