No. of Recommendations: 1
I'm flattered you would ask! I'm no real estate person but generally $167k won't buy you a closet anywhere near Seattle. To give you an idea of what construction costs are, we spec'd out an outbuilding (garage with an office over it) at our property in Eastern Washington...and it came out to be over $300,000.
Here's Zillow for Seattle:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/Seattle,-WA_rb/...and this is what $150k buys you there:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?searchQuery...That's 2 houseboats. If you add manufactured homes to the mix:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?searchQuery...To get into the Seattle city limits for houses, you're looking at $700k:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?searchQuery......you're still looking at nothing in the city limits, you have to go out a ways for that. Houses in the $150k range in Tacoma (40 miles south) look like this:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?searchQuery...Still very few.
There are all sorts of "Affordable housing initiatives" in the Pacific Northwest. They almost all fail for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that nobody looks at the underlying regulations for constructing new housing stock. So they hand out all these incentives to builders who will buy a lot at an estate sale, tear down the single family house and put up a 4-plex of condos that sell for $1M+ each. They might offer one of them at some reduced number, but certainly not all.
There are many reasons for the inflated prices, but one of the most simple is that it's very difficult to build out where the actual land is due to environmental regulations. They're so stringent that they reduce the amount of land supply and drive up pricing in the city of Seattle, to the tune of $200k plus per home:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-rul....
UW study: Rules add $200,000 to Seattle house priceThis was in 2008. Imagine what it is now!
I think you could a way better job of fixing houses than the government ever could. Just don't try it up here :).
