Cheap Housing, Anyone?
During some random blog surfing today, I came across a comment that mentioned that Detroit's house values are averaging around $10,000. This shocked me, even though I've heard rumors that the housing market in Detroit is astonishingly bad. So just for the heck of it, I visited zillow.com to get their take on it.
Zillow lists Detroit's "index price" as somewhere around $29,000. Not as bad as $10,000 but still pretty horrible. (Though I don't know exactly what they mean by that. Is it a median price? Probably some number magicked up by a proprietary formula.) In comparison, the lovely and highly depreciated area I live in gets an index value of $115,000. Apparently a place where summer temps can hit 117 degrees still beats out living in Detroit. Anyway, I spent a little longer fooling around with Zillow just for fun.
I did a general search of houses sold recently in Detroit and filtered out the foreclosures, just hoping to get a more generous picture of their state of affairs. The first featured home on my list was a 1942 2 bedroom/1 bath house that sold for a whopping $12,000. Hey, less than we paid for our used minivan! But our family of seven could never fit in a 900 sq ft house so I figured that wasn't going to cut it. Next, I selected the "for sale" group and filtered the pool to get only 4+ bedrooms with at least 2 bathrooms and 1600 square feet. The first house to pop up was this beauty:
Doesn't it just make you want to move to Detroit? No?? Well, maybe the asking price will. . . it's listed for a mere $100. One month's piano lessons and I could buy this 6 bedroom/ 2 bath house. Granted, it's probably in a serious state of disrepair and located in a 'hood where I couldn't walk down the street, but still!!
Again, this didn't seem like a fair comparison. After all, the house I live in is relatively new. So I narrowed my search to houses built after 2000. This gave me one house about the same size as my current one for $55,000. It also pulled up two veritable mansions running in the $500k range. Well, that's not enough to choose from, especially since the $55k one didn't have a picture. (It could be a burned out shack for all I know.) So I pushed the search date back to 1980.
Only the same 3 houses popped up. So I guess Detroit hasn't had a new housing boom (at least not in the main city) in the last thirty years. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. How dare I pick on those poor rust belt cities!
I finally cut Detroit some slack and looked up my own house. Zillow values us at $85,000. Hey, that means we're only down $100,000 from the price we paid for it! Not bad, since two years ago we were down $120,000. Maybe by the time the kids leave for college we could actually break even.
Zillow lists Detroit's "index price" as somewhere around $29,000. Not as bad as $10,000 but still pretty horrible. (Though I don't know exactly what they mean by that. Is it a median price? Probably some number magicked up by a proprietary formula.) In comparison, the lovely and highly depreciated area I live in gets an index value of $115,000. Apparently a place where summer temps can hit 117 degrees still beats out living in Detroit. Anyway, I spent a little longer fooling around with Zillow just for fun.
I did a general search of houses sold recently in Detroit and filtered out the foreclosures, just hoping to get a more generous picture of their state of affairs. The first featured home on my list was a 1942 2 bedroom/1 bath house that sold for a whopping $12,000. Hey, less than we paid for our used minivan! But our family of seven could never fit in a 900 sq ft house so I figured that wasn't going to cut it. Next, I selected the "for sale" group and filtered the pool to get only 4+ bedrooms with at least 2 bathrooms and 1600 square feet. The first house to pop up was this beauty:
Again, this didn't seem like a fair comparison. After all, the house I live in is relatively new. So I narrowed my search to houses built after 2000. This gave me one house about the same size as my current one for $55,000. It also pulled up two veritable mansions running in the $500k range. Well, that's not enough to choose from, especially since the $55k one didn't have a picture. (It could be a burned out shack for all I know.) So I pushed the search date back to 1980.
Only the same 3 houses popped up. So I guess Detroit hasn't had a new housing boom (at least not in the main city) in the last thirty years. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. How dare I pick on those poor rust belt cities!
I finally cut Detroit some slack and looked up my own house. Zillow values us at $85,000. Hey, that means we're only down $100,000 from the price we paid for it! Not bad, since two years ago we were down $120,000. Maybe by the time the kids leave for college we could actually break even.
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