What it costs to buy 2 bedrooms, 3, 4 and more
What's the cheapest way to buy a home if your aim is as many bedrooms as possible? Aim for attached housing.
In October, townhouses and rowhouses in the Baltimore region sold for substantially less than single-family houses in comparable bedroom categories. In fact, the average three-bedroom townhome or rowhome sold for about $15,000 less than the average house with two bedrooms or fewer.
And the average house with four bedrooms or more sold for nearly twice the average townhome/rowhome with that many bedrooms -- $395,000 vs. $202,000.
Here's the price breakdown from low to high, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence:
Townhouse/rowhouse, two bedrooms or fewer: $115,000
Townhouse/rowhouse, three bedrooms: $168,000
Single-family house, two bedrooms or fewer: $183,000
Townhouse/rowhouse, four bedrooms or more: $202,000
Single-family house, three bedrooms: $246,000
Single-family house, four bedrooms or more: $395,000
Homes tend to be cheaper in Baltimore than its suburbs, and Baltimore has a lot of rowhouses. That's undoubtedly one factor keeping the regionwide average for attached homes so much lower than the average for single-family houses.
There are other factors, obviously. Single-family homes are more likely to have bigger yards, driving up the price. Plenty of buyers are willing to pay extra for no attached walls. And since number of bedrooms doesn't necessarily tell you much about the square footage, some of the single-family premium could be about extra interior space. (MRIS doesn't issue statistics tracking sales price by square feet, more's the pity.)
But it's interesting, isn't it, that the average price buyers in October paid for a four-bedroom-plus townhome or rowhome was just $19,000 more than the average price buyers paid for a house with two bedrooms or fewer.
If you're wondering where condos fit into all this, I'm afraid that's not clear. MRIS tracks condos as a whole without breaking them out by number of bedrooms.
Average price for condos in October: $208,000. That's pricier than the averages for each of the categories of townhouse/rowhouse, but less expensive than the single-family categories for three bedrooms and four-plus.
Do you prefer condos, townhouses/rowhouses or single-family houses?
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Comments
Those rowhouse numbers must be skewed by investment property sales for vacants/fixer-uppers, compared to single-family houses.
You would be hard pressed to find a 2 bedroom rowhouse you could immediately move in to for an average of $115k. In fact I bet you can't go on zillow and find more than a couple listings at that price that don't require rehab work.
Posted by: direwolfc | December 12, 2011 9:22 AM
Well, here's an example of a three-bedroom rowhouse in Pigtown for $85,000: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1326-Sargeant-St-Baltimore-MD-21223/36533464_zpid/
Probably not updated enough for many buyers, but it appears perfectly livable from the photos. I saw a variety of other homes under $115k that seemed to fall into that category. So it really depends on someone's expectations about condition and location.
I definitely agree, though, that the average (and median) are being affected by very low-priced foreclosures.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | December 12, 2011 10:12 AM
I agree with Jamie, you can get a livable place for about 100k, it all depends on where you're willing to live. (It is almost certainly NOT going to be exactly what a buyer wants, though.) But it is very hard to make an applies to apples comparison or generalize. I read these statistics as just an average of what's happening in the region. These numbers have little or no bearing on the differences between House A and House B, even if the 2 hypothetical houses are on the same block.
Posted by: chappy10 | December 12, 2011 12:05 PM
Yeah, chappy10, apples-to-apples seems a pipe dream! Even if we had better data on square footage, that wouldn't get at what's been updated well, badly or not at all.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | December 12, 2011 12:10 PM