High end homes (mortgage, insurance, maintenance)

[Giggzz]

In your opinion what priice is consider a high end home? 300-400,000? 400-500,000? Higher than 600,000?

[younglisa7]

It all depends on your area. In our old neighborhood you couldn't even buy a piece of cement block junk house built in the 60's for your mid range. They are on the water but the houses are crap.
High end starts at $800,000 or so in that neighborhood. And the taxes and insurance will kill you.

[harry chickpea]

It also depends on where you were brought up. Post WWII had a lot of small, even tiny, single family ranch homes. If you grew up in a 1,000 sf house, high end starts a lot sooner than if your family owned a huge old Victorian home with all the finery of the gilded age.

Younglisa7 points out that location affects value disproportionately, so I would say that for me a high end house would be something over 3,000 sf and with a new build cost of more than $225/sf in the current market.

As an aside, I know that different folks have different needs and goals, but I sometimes wonder why people are attracted to houses that require a lot of ongoing physical maintenance and are a continual drain on finances. More power to them if they want them and can afford them, but I've seen so many big homes in the northeast that had to be divided into apartments or repurposed, that I now think of ownership of them as ephemeral, and see them less as status symbols than as symbols of unsustainable excess. In contrast, most of the mid-sized or more practical homes in the same area have remained family homes, sometimes in the same family for generations, blessing offspring with a solid grounding in community and relieving them of mortgages or rent.