Yeah, I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time, just sharing how drastically different housing markets can be. I could sell my house in California and buy a 400k house outright from the equity that has accumulated. Alot of middle class Californian are doing just that, selling their houses and buying in the south or midwest with cash. It’s part of what is inflating your housing costs because your market is more affordable than mine. For comparison, the median houshold income in my city is 89k but the median house list price is 1 million, making your market more affordable and attractive for those that need some relief from inflation.

Those numbers mean nothing without knowing the local wages. In my neighborhood the lowest priced 800 sqft homes are 950k and one bedroom rent is $2400. So your area sounds like a killer deal.

We bought in 2016 with 50k down at 3.5% and our payments were $2,800. We refinanced and now our payments are $2,400. Zillow says if we bought our same house today, at today’s rate with the same amount down the payments would be $7,700, an utterly unfathomable amount.