alt Hacker NewsCan confirm, this is where I’ve spent four years trying to buy a starter (2BR/2BA) home in on a single income. The biggest problem in older markets is that most housing stock is of appalling quality, requiring another five to six figures of work to get into a modern, habitable shape - unless you do the work yourself, which most can’t while they also hold down a FTE gig and deal with the return of urban commuting.
It’s bad.
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I sympathize and was in the same situation albeit a much easier market in hindsight. I came to Bay Area in 1999 and after finally facing the reality of the market after a couple of years, bit the bullet and bought something. The prices were/are so outrageous compared to my former residence in Austin the sticker shock and hyper competitive real estate market at the low end - every SFH I could comfortably afford was going to require significant amount of work to make palatable to someone who did not want the inside aesthetic of the 1950-1970s and still each had multiple bids, with cash bids above asking with no inspection always winning, I imagine this has only gotten worse at entry level with the elevation in total compensation for certain fields.
yeah for some reason there seems to be a pricing disconnect on many homes, the discount on home that needs a lot of work seems to be less than the current cost to fix it (especially when taking into account labor shortages and tariffs on materials)
Find a run-down structure not surrounded by derelicts on land that's otherwise favorable. 1 wall remodel. A modest structure costs roughly around $250k if built by someone else, vaguely divide that in half if DIY.
A lot of lower-end housing spends some years in the hands of people who can’t afford to keep up maintenance, and/or are too old to keep up with it well (… or to keep up with cleaning). As a result, it’s all but ruined by the time someone else gets a crack at it.