Asklemmy

I'm in Ashburn, VA. I just looked at Zillow and saw that the cheapest single family home right now is $625k for 2060 sqft. If you have a credit score >719 and put $100k (~16%) down, it's only $4438/month according to their estimates.

So my wife and I live in an apartment with no kids or pets, and we both work a lot... Maybe one day we can afford a townhouse? I just found a decent looking one that's only $450k so $3200/month...

Here in London, you can easily find for £120k a nice 100m² garage without plumbing outside of a busy hospital where passerbys go to smoke and urinate.

The cheapest home I could find in my hometown of Vancouver, BC is:

1 bedroom, 1 bath, 696 sq/feet 398,000

For more fun, calculate how much money you would have to make to meet the rule of having your mortgage only cost 30% of your take home pay!

To buy a home with a 2k mortgage and keep that rule, you'd need a TAKE HOME pay of nearly 80k, so easily needing 6 figures gross pay to afford these two homes while still keeping this rule.

155.000€ for new 5 bedroom 200+ m2 duplex in my small town in Spain.

No HOAs! supermarkets and schools are in walking distance ;)

Cheapest is around 30K, but why bother?

Here in a small village in the Netherlands the cheapest is 315k euro for 65m2 and 2 bedrooms

Here in Victoria BC the cheapest detached house is just shy of $1m cad. What a shithole

Like $15k if you want a total gut & remodel

Edit: found one for $10k. Fun. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1205-Mill-St-Pittsburgh-PA-15221/11379395_zpid/?utm_medium=referral

600 square feet? What do you do with all the space? I can't even conceive of having such a large house.

The house I live in is about the cheapest in my area that has an actual land deed. So it's an effective minimum for a house in my city -- smaller houses can't get land deeds, so you can't properly buy them. It costs about the equivalent of USD 150k.

I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The median salary is not so high here. So correcting for cost of living, that's 'something like' the equivalent 600k in the USA.

The other catch is that the house is 2.3 meters wide and maybe 9 meters long (including the walls). That's about 225 square freedom units. No yard in the front or back. Typically 2-3 families would live in a house like this, but it's just my wife and I, because I need half the space for my business. My previous residence was smaller, about 2 meters by 4.5 meters. The roof fell on me once, but otherwise it was quite acceptable. That cost about USD 5k to build (building only -- not land price), but you can't legally buy or sell it.

Home ownership is basically impossible here except through inheritance, or owning a successful business (which is quite a battle in a cost-driven market). Even then, most families get a small room, with no ownership paperwork or land deed -- the theoretical value of these is about 60k USD based on the rent vs. value of other buildings. So, equivalent to ~240k in the USA.

The other other catch is that bank interest rates are very high -- and unless you are already rich, chances are you cannot get a loan. So typically buying a home is done in cash. Some people who work at big companies with upper middle class salaries have been able to get loans in recent times too.

Off in the countryside, you can still get a decent plot of empty land for ~30k USD and build your own home (10k to 200k depending on whether it's a hut or a villa). However, there are basically zero employment opportunities out there, and you're far from advanced hospitals and so on. Basic services are available, roads and power are OK, and it's quite lovely. If you're in good health, know how to catch fish, and speak Vietnamese, it's actually a pretty good good life.

Anyway there are many things about life here that are really great (I mean, I chose to immigrate), but the path to home ownership is brutal. I thought it was brutal in North America but really I had no idea.

This is for an area of western, suburban Tokyo. Edit: most are going to be around 1.25+ hours into Shinjuku involving transfers and up to a 20 minute walk to the nearest station.

In USD terms, around $76,000. 52.x square meters 3 rooms, bath, dining+kitchen (so one room is presumably getting used as the living room). Another few hundred a year in maintenance/condo fees. But it's in a building from 1976 which is before the latest major earthquake law revision and I would absolutely not live there (property can appreciate in Japan, but houses are not seen as investments and lose value really quickly).

Poking around, there are freestanding houses as well in that range, but they cannot be rebuilt so you're stuck with the existing structure (I don't know to what degree one could legally "Ship of Theseus" the thing; interior renovation is fine). This is mostly due to a change in law requiring at least a 4-meter-wide (IIRC) road connecting to the property (and mostly for emergency services access). You can buy these on the cheap but it's because they're not a long-term solution and you'll be stuck holding the bag on worthless land to all except maybe a neighbor who might want to buy it (but if it's for sale now, they don't).

There are actually a surprising number of buildings after 1981 (latest major earthquake law revision, basically required for mortgage + insurance), but a lot of them are in areas with heavy restrictions (landscape laws, height laws, aviation laws (I have no idea what that one means; maybe it's in a flight path (noisy) or has some additional height/light restrictions?)), etc.

The search site I used doesn't have any good way of searching for used homes without restrictions built after 1981 for comparison and I got tired of clicking.

Prices jump a lot within a 20-minute walk of the closest station; most people don't want to live further.

This housing crisis won't change until we start to move into politician's lawns and garages.

$200,000 for a 1 Bed 1 Bath with an hour and a half commute to the city. It's a unit, so probably has a bunch of other fees attached for upkeep but they aren't listed. Area is far away from necessary services, highly car dependent and notoriously crime ridden. The unit is run down and requires renovations.

Double that for a 2 Bed 1 Bath in a similar area.

$229k NZD for a 2 bed, 1 bath 80sqm slumlord rental in a shit neighbourhood in Christchurch, New Zealand

315k GBP for a 2br 'period property' (aka a disgusting dilapidated horder house with the energy efficiency of a tent)

Figure in another 100k and a year to fix it, due to how UK contractors work.

There are houses in my town that have sold in the last 12 months for less than $100,000.
These don't include the shacks that are falling apart that sell for $30,000.

This one was bought, fixed up, and is currently listed for $132,000.

My house is a small two story granny cottage with a total floor area of 90sqm (1000sqf) though the upstairs have a low ceiling so the "true" floor are is closer to 60sqm (650sqm). The plot is 1000sqm (10500sqf) and has an additional building with a sauna and a small workshop space. It's located about 10km (6 miles) from the city centre on a residential neighbourhood in Finland. It's one of the major cities in the country. I paid about 105k€ for it which means 450€/month

For a “cheap “ suburb of Boston

• $580k for 1,038 sq ft 2 br on a 5,000 sq ft lot. The homes on this area were originally built as summer cottages so they’re going to be expensive to heat. Of 12 single family homes for sale, 7 are over $1M and one is in a different town
• $265k for a 1 br condo, 579 sq ft. The only feature listed is “private entrance”. Second cheapest is a new townhouse for $1.5M

4.5 Rooms, 95 square meter apartment, 1‘315‘000 CHF.

Edit: Rotkreuz, Zug, Switzerland

The cheapest one is apparently in the town next door. It's a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 984 square foot single family home built in 1955, on a third-of-an-acre lot with no HOA.

All the pictures are of the outside only, so I'm assuming the inside is pure shit. However, I also have to assume it's some kind of liveable shit, because the places that aren't liveable generally have to list as "0 bedrooms".

It's $60,000, in south/central New Jersey. Or $665 per month, which includes 30 year mortgage as well as property taxes.

(£1 gbp = $1.27 usd = €1.17 eur)

Cheapest land - £15,000 (0.56 acres)

Cheapest "house" - £50,000 - The dwellinghouse may be suitable for renovation or as a building site for a new property

Cheapest livable house - £85,000 - looks like it was lived in at least.

Cheapest flat - £85,000 (1 bed)

Church - £100,000 - The adjacent cemetery is not included in the sale.

Excluding mobile homes, you can get a 318 square foot studio in downtown San Diego for only $180,000! Not including the $770/mo HOA fee. I like that the listing includes a lot size of 1.2 acres, as if you get the whole city block to yourself.

With a quick search on Zillow for Lincoln, Nebraska (~300k pop college town), cheapest I can find is $90k for a 1 bed/1 bath 500 sqft condo. $100k for a 1 bed/1 bath 500 sqft house, though technically that's a foreclosure so you might not consider that to count. The cheapest normal house for sale that I can find is $110k for a 2 bed, 1 bath 1500 sqft house. It's an older home, but actually a pretty decent location (close-ish to downtown).

Saw a listing for a house which has had a fire and all the copper pipes stolen being sold as is for 300K in a really gritty location in the city.

The cheapest livable in Paris, FR would be a 35m2 with two rooms, a kitchen and a tiny basement room for 30k€. It’s actually sold by the courts in April in an auction after being seized for whatever reason and I currently wonder whether I should make an offer for it as it’s so dirt cheap and I could pay it cash.

Too fucking expensive for me, that's how much.

Definitely under 50K (USD), but that's because I live in the sticks.

$80k cad - 3 bedroom and 1 bath. Probably needs a good cleaning and upgrade. Bus stop close by. Not so good area but it's ok.

$70k in my area in NC. It's a lovely 2bd/1ba, and can keep the rain off your head (mostly). It totally wouldn't be condemned if actually inspected.

SE MI - $100k for a rundown piece of shit

Not answering the question really, but it prompted me to check out property prices in my home town in New Zealand - small town near a small city in the south. Example: 3br "character" wooden villa on a small section, NZ$700k (US$434k, £350k). I had heard about the explosion in NZ house prices, but that really took me aback. The house I live in now, 3br mid-terrace with garden in a similar sized Scottish town, would sell for about £250k. Even that seems crazy expensive, but at least it's within half an hour of a fantastic city.

(The estate agent's website lists previous sale prices, it shows the kiwi horror story: 2022: $570k; 2019: $430k; 2011: $271k; 1988: $52k; 1984: $26k.)

Oh fun. $330k for a 500sqft shack that is partially collapsed. The only info on the listing states the lot will need to be scraped, so basically that is the cost of an empty lot.

Going out a bit further, you can find a couple of houses around $350k that are liveable. They are 700-900 sqft and 0-2 bedrooms.