Throughout most of America, owning a $1 million home gives you definite bragging rights – it means you may have six bedrooms, 5,000 square feet, an infinity pool, and at least a few acres of property.
But along the coasts – and particularly in California – the two comma club has lost most of its novelty. That’s because in some places, like San Jose, CA, the majority (53.8%) of homes are already soaring past the $1 million mark, despite most of them looking nothing more than ordinary.
$1 MILLION HOMES BY CITY
Today’s chart uses data from a study by LendingTree, which ranks the largest 50 U.S. cities by the percentage of million dollar homes in each metro area. The data from the study was pulled out of a database of 155 million property prices throughout the country.
Here are the 22 U.S. cities that have at least 1% of their housing stock exceeding the $1 million value mark:
The data looks pretty telling, with four of the top five cities being located in California. In each of those cities, more than 10% of all homes have surpassed the $1 million mark.
In the Bay Area specifically, prices are amplified even further: San Francisco (40.0%) and San Jose (53.8%) have by far more $1 million homes than other major cities in the country. It’s also worth noting that in San Jose, the median price of all homes is a whopping $1,069,000.
You can just imagine what houses might cost in some of the Silicon Valley towns like Mountain View or Palo Alto, or just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County.
THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST
While the above chart shows the 22 U.S. cities with the most $1 million homes, LendingTree also listed the major cities in the country with the fewest.
Buffalo, located in upstate New York, takes this title, with only 0.10% of homes passing the mark and an overall median home price of just $141,000. So, to buy the average home in San Jose, you’d need to sell off about eight average houses in Buffalo.
The other cities with the smallest concentrations of million dollar homes are also located in the Great Lakes and Midwest regions: Pittsburgh (0.17%), Hartford (0.18%), Cleveland (0.19%), and Indianapolis (0.27%).