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In a nice Seattle residential neighborhood on a busy street with buses.
Lol. Seattle is expensive compared to many cities, but a remodeled craftsman (with a separate living space upstairs complete with a kitchen) in one of Seattle’s trendier neighborhoods, with good schools, for $1.14M is hardly a starter home. Plenty of houses in great shape for less than half of pthat (in the city proper and not some far out suburb).
Lol. Seattle is expensive compared to many cities, but a remodeled craftsman (with a separate living space upstairs complete with a kitchen) in one of Seattle’s trendier neighborhoods, with good schools, for $1.14M is hardly a starter home. Plenty of houses in great shape for less than half of pthat (in the city proper and not some far out suburb).
Maybe in neighborhoods like Rainier Beach or Lake City you can find a livable SFH for $500k. I’d take a far out suburb over those neighborhoods though. It’s cheap for a reason.
In any case the OPs idea of a starter home with the examples he gave is quite different from yours. I’ll say a two bedroom Craftsman in Seattle in a decent neighborhood on a busy street kind of is a starter home if your goal is to eventually end up with a bigger house in a nice neighborhood in Seattle.
There are no new construction starter homes in my town. The land is too expensive. You can’t build a house and sell it for $450k when building cost is $250/sf and the lot is a teardown that would cost $300k in an undesirable section of town. A starter home here is a small vintage post-WW II ranch or split on a small lot. Then remodel it using friends & family in the trades or sweat equity. My house is like that. I spent more remodeling over 4 years than what I paid for the house. The house next to me is going through it now. $460k last November. A crew is in the house now doing kitchen & baths. All the windows were replaced. There was an HVAC van in the driveway for a week so I assume a new heating system. I imagine they will move in this summer. I’d guess they’ll have $600k sunk into a 1,600 sf house with 7 foot ceilings on the ground floor and a fieldstone foundation basement that floods.
Non starter homes tend to be in the 600s, and plenty of $1M+ in the city. But one thing about the south’s zoning laws, you can still find deals in an otherwise premium suburb
I live in St. Louis county in a little city called Glendale (population 3,500). It's when it's not rush hour just it's 20 minutes by close highway to get downtown. The community is rated A+ by Niche. It has one of the lowest crime rates in the state, would be in either the Kirkwood or Webster Groves school district (both are highly rated), is close to good paying jobs (2.8 million metro area), and has a very Beaver Cleaver type atmosphere with older homes and big trees. Some of the smallest homes are being torn down and new Craftsman style homes in the $900,000 - $1,100,000 are being built in their place which has raised the size, amenities, and price of what might now be a starter homes in our city. Two of our neighboring communities, Kirkwood and Webster Groves have super cute thriving old time downtowns. Kirkwood has a population of 29,000 and Webster Groves has a population of 24,000. Their real estate offerings and tear down situation is similar to our little city.
Attached is an example of a starter home in our community now (price $329,000). It's a two bedroom / one bath home with two bathrooms if you count the second one in the partially finished basement. Square footage not counting the partially finished basement is 1,088. This house was built in 1951.
Being an older community we don't have new starter homes. Our new builds which are all teardowns are similar to this one which will be five bedrooms / between three and four baths and about 2500 square feet (priced at $970,000): https://www.homes.com/property/865-f...0vzpznbgpj1jb/
Our community is considered to be in a seller's market with the median price of a home being $450,000 and the average home being on the market for 12 days in April of 2023.
We have lived here for over 30 years now. DH is now retired and I have a full time work from home job in IT, so could live anywhere as long as I have good wi-fi and a good work from home office. We originally thought me might move when we retired, but the more we looked around (We used to live in Denver and looked around Colorado a bit) the more we appreciated what we think is the darling little community that we live in. We have a son that lives just 16 minutes from us too, so we love that. Anyway, we decided to stay put.
This is not our community, but is the closest place to us that actually has starter home new construction. An old mall in Crestwood, MO was torn down and a strip mall, mixed development stuff and new homes are being built on the site. It's a nice community in a good school district too, but farther from the core. I consider it a good city for people looking for something less expensive than Kirkwood / Webster Groves / Glendale. Here is the website to those. It looks like the entry level new construction is coming in between $407,00 (2 bedroom / 2.5 baths) and $462,000 (3 bedroom / 3.5 baths).
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