Look at the above image (click for larger version)… Can you tell the difference?
Sure, one is a nearby suburb of Boston and the other is the archetypal poster boy of mass-manufactured suburban sprawl located roughly the same distance from Trenton but still… It seems fairly clear to me, as a longtime resident of the Boston metro area, that Bostonians got absurdly heady when valuing their location location location!
I should remind my Boston area readers that it wasn’t that long ago that our suburbs were considered, even by local standards, to be quite spotty and even the least discriminating among us could easily cast judgments in all directions.
Please excuse the snarky nature of this post and I certainly mean no disrespect to the people of Levittown Pennsylvania (or Levittown New York, or former Levittown New Jersey now known as Willingboro), Trenton or Boston for that matter, but really… what exact bit of social psychology made well educated, mostly affluent people fall all over themselves to bid up these cramped cookie cutter suburban homes to such stratospheric heights?
In the boom years, a typical experience for a buyer of any of the homes in this view would be to attend the first open house, sign an offer contract on the spot duly secured with a $1000 earnest money deposit, and then gear up to participate in the bidding war that would inevitably ensue shortly thereafter.
If you were the “lucky” buyer, it meant that you either feverishly bid to the top of the pile or agreed to some of the most stringent purchase restrictions (i.e. shortened timeline and limited or sometimes no inspections) or, in many cases, did both.
Your price, in 2005, was likely in the range of $550,000 - $650,000 with many homes in this view easily fetching over $700,000.
All this for modest capes and ranches sitting on small and tight, non-private lots, many within earshot of a major highway in post-war developments where hardly a home exceeds 1500 square feet.
Though many homes had been recently renovated, no amount of stainless steel and granite can hide the fact that an undersized three bedroom one and a half bath is a starter home by any modern standard.
Today, these very same homes are coming back down to earth.
Most are temporarily still fetching low 4’s to mid 5’s but the exuberant mania is a thing of the past.
Demand is down and attitudes are changing as buyers rightfully expect more for their half a million dollar debt burden than a humble starter home that has no guarantee of being worth the sale price even for many years to come.
