When you're done traveling, you want a pleasant place to call home, stow your passport and do your laundry for the next trip. And if home ownership is not yet in the cards, you might want to start thinking about where you might choose to put down those roots. American Home Shield is here to help. It is sharing its data about which American neighborhoods are the most expensive. We'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's a plus or a minus!
The company calculated the price per square footage of the average local property because, as we all know, the neighborhood dramatically affects the price. We've all seen that tiny studios in New York City can sell for millions while you can purchase a mansion in a less expensive community for under $500k. The study looked at more than 22,000 neighborhoods nationwide to gather data.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the country's most expensive place to buy property is in San Francisco, specifically its South of Market neighborhood. Known as SoMa, this area boasts lots of upscale dining and fun clubbing, as well as a fantastic art museum (the MoMa in SoMa!). a convention center in case you want to duck in to breakout rooms to pass around your business card, and perhaps best of all, it's walking distance to AT&T Park where the Giants play. It's also home to two important districts, the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District and the Pilipinas Filipino Cultural Heritage District, which draws a connection between the city and the Philippines (Tagalog is the third official language of San Francisco). Fun fact: the neighborhood used to be called South of the Slot because of the slot or trench that held the cable for the cable cars that once ran here.
Want to hear the painful number? In SoMa, the average property sells for $5,415 per square foot.
In the second most expensive neighborhood, Northwest Auburn in Auburn, CA, the average price is $4,416 per square foot. And the third place, Old Town Carpinteria in the city of Carpinteria, CA, near to Santa Barbara, has an average price of $4,416. If you thought for sure Manhattan would be the highest, the West Village is the highest in New York; its average property sells for $2,680 per square foot.
If you want to draw the focus out to the state level, the study found that most of the most expensive real estate in the nation is in California, New York and Florida.