The Salary You Must Earn To Buy A House In Tallahassee
A recent article showed what it takes to buy a house in different markets across the US, and (of course) it did not include Tallahassee, Florida.
One down-side to having a great quality of life and relatively zero traffic is that Tallahassee never shows up in these types of national reports, as our population is not sufficiently large to catch their attention.
Despair not, we'll do our own brief article on what it takes to buy a house in Tallahassee.
First of all, take a look at the cool graphic as seen on hsh.com (modified by me to include Tallahassee).
The salary you must earn to buy a home in Tallahassee
The image above shows the estimated salary required to buy a median-priced home in each major city in the US. The good news is that you don't need as large a salary if you buy below the median, so somebody in Tallahassee who makes $30,000 can still buy a single family detached home!
If you were looking to buy a median priced home in San Francisco, you need a salary of $161,948. That type of salary in Tallahassee puts you in the top 1% of the homes for sale in Tallahassee, so it really begs a huge question ... why don't these big salary people move to Tallahassee? Sure, the commute would be burdensome, but their home would be 5x the size and have much nicer amenities.
I think the most revealing piece of information from this graphic is the fact that Tallahassee is just so much more affordable than other areas in the Country. Only the depressed economy in Detroit, Michigan brought its home values down low enough to be at the same level as Tallahassee.
Median Home Price In Tallahassee
The following graph shows median home price movement in Tallahassee over the past 26 years.
The reason that the monthly mortgage payment is (so low) for our median priced home is a combination of low prices and low mortgage interest rates.
Every other market shares the benefit of low mortgage interest rates, but they have home prices that (in Tallahassee terms) are through the roof.
You really have to expect that as the housing market recovery continues in Tallahassee, we'll continue to see home values rise. Builders certainly cannot create new homes at these prices, so once the demand for homes exceeds what is already in place, expect to see our median price soar higher.
An alternative to consider is this. If interest rates go higher and Tallahassee leaders do nothing to significantly impact our local economy, than we won't see the median home price move higher at all. Instead, we'll see a significant change in what a median home is. You can GO HERE to see pictures of the past 10 years of median homes in Tallahassee.
Right now, the median home in Tallahassee is a 27 year old single family detached home with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths and 1,560 square feet of heated and cooled living space on a quarter acre lot.
But if home affordability declines due to rising interest rates and only moderate movement in wages, then we'll see the median home evolve to a multi-family property type (condominium or townhome) where several units exist on one quarter-acre lot and they contain shared walls and unit sizes below 1,200 square feet. How can I know this?
Because that is how it has evolved everywhere else. Are they still building single family detached homes in downtown NYC? If they did, they'd cost tens of millions of dollars right? When land becomes scarce and costs soar, homes go vertical. Tallahassee will not escape this inevitability.
If you are in the market to buy a home or sell a home, you'll do much better if you understand the short-term and long-term ramifications of the decisions you make when it comes time to move. Take advantage of our market knowledge by working with the Joe Manausa Real Estate company, and you'll end up as happy as our customers whom we've served before you. You'll find some of their comments below.
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