I live in the Austin, TX metro area. Builders have basically the same floorplan that is $200K less but 20 miles further from downtown Austin. In one case a 4 bedroom 2,446 sqft house is $339K while a similar one is $544K for a 3 bedroom 2,000 sqft home. The homes are 20-25 miles apart.
Is location, distance that important? Also the community with the cheaper prices has better schools, lower crime and less traffic. As much as people complain about home affordability I don't understand why so few are grabbing these low cost homes in better communities.
Why won't people live out further for cheaper homes?
byu/waveduality inRealEstate
Posted by waveduality
32 Comments
> Is location, distance that important?
Yes.
Hey reddit, is your time valuable?
One of the top priorities for most buyers is location.
20 miles out may be a suburban hellscape of heat and nothing to do. I don’t know specifically where 20 miles out would take you but most people looking for an urban lifestyle don’t want to live in an HOA, a farm or five miles from the nearest neighbor. Personally, it’s worth 100k more to live near where I work, walk to dinner or lunch, and have a bunch of things to do less than 5 minutes away.
I personally would love to live on a farm but not an HOA lol
Because traffic and commutes are really mentally draining. But also a lot of people really like the city vibe.
Location is everything.
20-25 miles of your job in downtown is an hour a day more of commute
Commuting is hell.
Iirc, traffic in Austin is a total nightmare. I’d pay a premium to live closer in just to avoid having to deal with the highways
Some people will pay/can afford to pay, to avoid sitting in traffic.
For a lot of buyers, that $200k gap is the price of time, not the house. A 20-25 mile move can mean 60-90 extra minutes a day, fewer job options, less family support, and a much harder resale pool if fuel costs or return-to-office rules tighten. People aren’t always buying the best floor plan on paper, they’re buying the life they can sustain every weekday.
People value location differently. Some people will sacrifice money to save time in their daily commutes, be closer to friends and family’s, have their kids attend a certain school district, be closer to an airport if they travel alot ect.
I purchased in a cheaper area 7 years ago and we recently paid the premium to move back closer to the city and don’t regret that decision at all.
Traffic is a mental game that kills you.
Because people don’t necessarily want to live far away from things.
I want to live in a community with people. I could live in a 6000 sq foot mansion, or a 1500 sq foot home in a walkable area. I choose the walkable area every time.
Having grown up away from people in a very isolated suburban location requiring a car for every trip, I don’t want that for my child. My kid craves the interaction that they get when going outside and seeing people.
Adding 20-25 miles onto my daily commute each way for the next 10-20 years has a huge cost. Time is valuable. Not a hard concept
> Is location, distance that important?
Go ahead and look of the top 3 most important factors for real estate.
Commuting sucks?
Location and distance can mean everything to a homebuyer.
Because 20–25 miles in Austin isn’t “a little farther,” it can be an extra 60–90 minutes of your life every weekday. People will pay a stupid premium to buy back time, keep their social/pro network close, and reduce commute risk if job/location changes. Cheaper house + better schools can absolutely be the smarter play, but for a lot of buyers the real cost isn’t the mortgage, it’s the daily grind.
I mean if you are a floor nurse working 3 days a week then yeah that would make more sense to you.
A lot of people did that when they were able to work from home. Finding a job with a reasonable commute becomes much harder the further you are away from the city.
Some older people actually do this when they retire.
Where are you going to work?
You want me to add an hour to my commute one way, every workday, for thirty years to save $200k?
An extra ten minute drive to work means 20 minutes a day, 100 minutes a week, 400 minutes per month. Those are some long hours of your life where you could’ve done something way better
Yes. Have you ever had a commute over 30 minutes? It’s absolute hell and soul crushing.
I think this is just a troll account trying to rage bait, look at their post history
I think it’s the commuting, when I worked in an office I wanted to be as close to that office as possible.
Now that I work from home? Yeah we are moving to a larger, cheaper house farther away from the city. Totally worth it, in my opinion.
Commuting is soul sucking. I grew up in the Bay area and went through insane traffic every day. In town and on freeways.
Now I live in Austin and work from home. But I moved a little farther away from my office when I worked downtown and commuted in. I got depressed and so tired by the time I got home after being in hellacious traffic.
I took a huge pay check to work from home but I’ve never felt better in my life.
It’s the same in the Charlotte NC area, but cheaper means close to an hour commute. Atlanta’s even worse. All the larger cities are becoming little LA’s or NYC’s. Big businesses need to decentralize their offices. It would make living easier and also provide redundant facilities (smaller but redundant) when the inevitable blackouts, terrorism, whatever occur.
This is kind of like asking “why buy the oceanfront home for $1.5M when you can buy one a block away for $1M and a mile away for $500k?”
It’s all about location. Always has been, always will be.
You don’t need to value your time all that highly before spending an extra $200k to save 40 miles roundtrip every weekday becomes a no-brainer.
As someone who lives in south Austin and commutes to the east side, yes, I value location. I wish I lived closer to my job but my commute already sucks and I would absolutely be in deeper hell if I had to commute further.