Like he** I'm going to pay these prices! (Boston, Cambridge: transplants, neighborhoods)

[bobspez]

Originally Posted by Boston Shudra

You didn’t even need to go back a page to see that I already did this

And again: was it $700 total or $700 per person. Either is practically impossible in the area right now.

Try going 10 miles further out. The further you get from the city the cheaper the rents and houses. That was true then and is true today.

[mdovell]

Well the other factor back in the day was interest rates were not only high but went up and down all over the place. I would argue that it was next to impossible to budget for a ARM from the late 70's to early 80s. Rates might have been 8-9% when my parents bought their first house, 10% for their second and maybe 6-7% for their third. Mine is 2.75%. They paid about 12% more than I did but if I refinish the extra unit I have more space.

[sawyer2]

My wife and I respectively bought our first place in Brookline and the South End a few years out of college. Correcting for inflation, salaries, and looking at current prices etc., there is absolutely no way we would be able to do that today.

Our rates were 6 or 7 which kept prices more attainable ...... of course the S End was a lot sketchier and Coolidge Corer had far more students. Rates dropped, prices went up, we refinanced - we are on the opposite end of that at the moment so who knows what will happen.

l do think that the premier locations are still worth it from a long term perspective, but I wouldn't want to be holding 'the next X' or 'up and coming Y' when the current rate party is over.

[bobspez]

It depends on how badly you need/want a house and how much you will give up to have it. With our first house I was paying more than half of my take home pay for the mortgage and utilities. My wife was a stay at home Mom. I travelled about 10 miles south of our apartment to find a house we could afford. I used public transportation to work, and we had an old beater to use for groceries. We had two small bedrooms for the 3 kids and one for us. No vacations other than the above ground pool in the back yard. Entertainment was a VCR and renting a couple of movies at Blockbuster, and walks in the park.

Originally Posted by sawyer2

My wife and I respectively bought our first place in Brookline and the South End a few years out of college. Correcting for inflation, salaries, and looking at current prices etc., there is absolutely no way we would be able to do that today.

Our rates were 6 or 7 which kept prices more attainable ...... of course the S End was a lot sketchier and Coolidge Corer had far more students. Rates dropped, prices went up, we refinanced - we are on the opposite end of that at the moment so who knows what will happen.

l do think that the premier locations are still worth it from a long term perspective, but I wouldn't want to be holding 'the next X' or 'up and coming Y' when the current rate party is over.

[huff100]

The housing market got crazy here (and I think all over the country). Luckily my husband and I bought 7 years ago! We could not afford our own house now, we bought a horrible fixer upper and invested about 75k to make it the way it needed to be! But our mortgage is lower because of it.
Anything near Boston is nuts right now.

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by huff100

Anything near Boston is nuts right now.

I think it extends even further away from Boston in terms of what is nuts.

I've been casually looking at houses to help Friends upgrade from their home in Reading, and it's just crazy what some houses are selling for. They want to be away from Boston, further up 128, and even there homes that they would consider an upgrade are in the $800-1Mil range and have been subject to bidding wars and waived contingencies. These houses would probably be $600-700K tops a few years ago just due to the location. But now WFH policies and light Covid traffic have made them more appealing. After a month of looking, i'm actually discouraged of the prospects of my wife and I selling our home and upgrading.


If I didn't own any property at all, i'm not sure I would want to get into the market right now. I don't mean to be discouraging here, but if I was just starting out and looking to buy, there would be no way I could compete right now. I would just continue to rent, and sock money away into an ETF or some other means to grow it over the next few years and hope for a correction.

But then again, who knows. I could be wrong and 5 years from now we are commenting on a post about "Prices back in 2021 were so cheap compared to now. Wish I bought then"

[msRB311]

I think we thought there'd be more people purchasing further away from city because of all the remote work going on...but I"m not sure that really took off?

[NewfieMama]

Originally Posted by huff100

The housing market got crazy here (and I think all over the country). Luckily my husband and I bought 7 years ago! We could not afford our own house now, we bought a horrible fixer upper and invested about 75k to make it the way it needed to be! But our mortgage is lower because of it.
Anything near Boston is nuts right now.

We bought in 2010 when it was very much a buyer's market. I think we walked through 80 homes with no pressure to purchase--there were a lot of low-ball offers happening in the market then and there was an $8K credit for first-time homebuyers because the market hadn't recovered from 2008.

My husband and I have been having the "do we renovate some areas of our house or buy a different house" conversation. Granted, these conversations have been happening for YEARS and we have stayed put, but we really need to make some updates or find something that better fits our needs. With the cost of renovating increasing significantly and the cost (and pressure) of buying, all options seem stressful right now. We looked at a house 2 weeks ago that we already thought was overpriced and the the realtor said there were already multiple bids over asking, so we'd have to be competitive if we wanted it. It was only on the market for a few days before all offers were accepted and reviewed. The pressure right now is too much.

[charolastra00]

Originally Posted by msRB311

I think we thought there'd be more people purchasing further away from city because of all the remote work going on...but I"m not sure that really took off?

Prices out here in Marlborough tell a different story.



I'm looking at a condo (and trying to decide if I could stretch it) that's going for $325K for a 2 bedroom + loft, 2 bath. It's in a crowded little condo complex off a main road. When it last sold in 2018, it was almost 100K cheaper than it is now and doesn't seem to have had any major updates since then.

You can still get into some of the iffier complexes with 2 beds/1 bath/no office space/no in-unit laundry for around 200K, but those almost all go to investors looking to rent it out.



I know some people thought we'd see a huge boom in VT or western Mass, and I can't speak to either of those, but I think even with WFH most people anticipate occasionally having to come into the office so they want to be no further than an hour and a half away.

[NewfieMama]

Originally Posted by msRB311

I think we thought there'd be more people purchasing further away from city because of all the remote work going on...but I"m not sure that really took off?

I think some people are waiting to see what commutes look like once we are a little bit more back to "normal".