Cities with the largest, the smallest, and the most expensive houses
Dec. 5—Though the housing market has taken a sharp downturn from its halcyon days of 2021, there are still plenty of sprawling mansions, small homes and expensive houses to suit many homebuyers' preferences.
Realtor.com recently released its study on the cities where the largest and smallest homes are currently available to buy. For this study, Realtor.com surveyed all of its active for-sale listings in September 2022. It then hunted down the places where homes with the highest and lowest median square footage were located.
George Ratiu, senior economist and manager of economic research with Realtor.com, said, "The places that boast the country's largest average homes tend to be clustered in higher-priced communities, either near bigger economic centers or in outdoors destinations ... [O]n the flip side of the coin, cities [with] average home sizes [that] skew toward the smaller end are located in geographically constrained locations, where natural boundaries meet high-density development."
In comparison, the median square footage of Santa Fe houses for sale in October 2022 was 2,041. This would put Santa Fe almost right in the middle of the pack.
Know that small homes with big price tags in "destination cities" — such as Long Island City, Honolulu, Miami Beach, Boston, Long Beach and Washington, DC — are often purchased by buyers looking for short-term rental investment properties.
RealtyHop.com, an online real estate marketplace, took a look at the most expensive zip codes in the U.S. for 2022. For the third consecutive year, the zip code 94027, in Atherton, California, came in as the country's most expensive. The median price of a home there in November 2022 was $9,000,000, up 0.58% from $8,950,000 in 2021.
Thirteen states have zip codes that qualified as RealtyHop's most expensive in 2022. New Mexico did not register on the list. However, Realtor.com did put Santa Fe's 87506 at the top of New Mexico's most expensive homes by zip code. According to their 2021 survey, the typical value of a Santa Fe home was $817,225.
Nationally, the median price point in the 100 most expensive zip codes hit $2,749,500, an increase of 11.03% from $2,476,250 last year. Compare those figures to Santa Fe's numbers: a median price in 87506 of $550,000 in October 2021 to $665,000 as of this October. That's an increase of nearly 21%, which is twice the increase of what the nation's median most expensive zip code comes in at.
Largest, smallest, expensive homes
