Reply to $1,565,000 million in Gaithersburg

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's a really nice house. OP, you seem to have strange hangups about Gaithersburg, but if you do a streetview, you'll see that this is a beautiful neighborhood.[/quote]

It is far out from DC and Nova and when I was house hunting in 2017 Gaithersburg, Rockville were the cheaper areas due to longer commute and non-w schools, now the prices are getting nuts out there.

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You seem to have a 2017 view on it, though.  This house is NOT Bethesda prices in 2026 - a similar house in Bethesda would go for $2.5M now I believe.  New construction is $3.5M+.  [/quote]

DP. The point is that this house is selling for 2017 Bethesda prices. So in just 9 years, what was an affordable area for families to buy in is now too expensive for most middle class families. [b]So where do we go?[/b]

9 years ago, this house would have sold for 900k. But most of us didn't see a commensurate increase in incomes over that time. And of course rates are higher now than they were in 2017, so you need even more income to cover the mortgage even if you have the down payment.

It just sucks, especially for those of us in industries where we will simply never be able to afford a house that costs this much. This area used to have a lot of decent options for middle class people, especially if you were willing to live a bit further out. Rockville and Gaithersburg were popular because you'd even have the option of commuting by Metro, which could save you money on a second car and the costs of parking downtown. But now even these places are out of reach for many.

Housing prices are out of control. And it's not like rent is any cheaper -- it's still actually more expensive to rent than to buy in most of this area, despite interest rates. Especially if you need a home for a family.[/quote]

Lots of perfectly nice houses can be found between the Forest Glen and Wheaton metro stations for $500K to $600K. They might not look like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog but they're perfectly fine and probably resemble the sort of house you might have lived in growing up. Keep in mind that the median household income in Moco is approximately $150K, so these houses are perfectly affordable. Many people buy these sorts of houses, lead happy and productive lives, have easy commutes, and don't sit around whining about how unaffordable everything is.[/quote]

Or you buy a townhouse and — shocker! — stay in it.

We bought our Lakelands townhouse for $665K in 2018. We put $100K into a gut reno.

We refinanced into a 15 year fixed with a sub-2% interest rate.

No plans to move, even though our HHI has been $650-1.1M/year ever since, depending on how stock options play out.

When DD goes to college, we will have paid off our townhouse. We’ll take the equity and move somewhere else.

Not all of us feel the need to buy the absolute most expensive house we can possibly get ourselves into.[/quote]

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