This 1672 House Is the Oldest For Sale in America

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This 1672 House Is the Oldest For Sale in America

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Homes that are 200 years older or more are not uncommon, particularly in the areas around the 13 original states. Some homes in New England were built in the 1700s. It is rare to find any much older.

Realtor.com looked for the oldest house currently for sale in America. Located at 51 Lake Street in Norfolk, Massachusetts, this home is on the market for $1.1 million. For that, a buyer gets a relatively large house that covers 4,048 square feet. It includes four bedrooms and 3.5 baths. It also sits on a very large piece of property that covers 17.5 acres. The lakeside house has a tennis court and an in-ground pool.

Norfolk is located about midway between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. It sits between I-95, which runs roughly northeast to southwest, and I-495, which runs roughly northwest to southeast. It is also near Foxborough, home to the New England Patriots.

Norfolk has a little over 12,000 residents. They are wealthy by U.S. standards, with a median household income of $145,817, and almost 84% white. The median value of a home is $656,873, so the house at 51 Lake St. is at the high end of the market. The town covers 14.8 square miles, which means its population density is 757 people per square mile. Unemployment is an extremely low 5.6%.
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According to CoreLogic, housing prices have soared in the past year, which is not surprising given the nearly nationwide migration to suburbs driven to some extent by the COVID-19 pandemic. The last time this house was sold, in 1987, the price was $481,000. Most of the nearby homes are on the market for between $799,000 and $1 million.

Click here to see the most expensive zip code in each state.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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