This City Has the Most Affordable Mansions

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This City Has the Most Affordable Mansions

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Residential real estate prices in many cities have risen so much that some people who live in them can no longer afford to buy a new house. The influx of new buyers seeking a better lifestyle during the pandemic has spiked demand. Many of these people have moved from ultra-expensive coast cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. These buyers have been helped by low mortgage rates, and sometimes by the rise in their own investments, often in the stock market. In most cities, mansions cost millions of dollars. In a few cities, that is not true.

Realtor.com defines a mansion as a home that is over 5,000 square feet. The median price of these homes was $1.58 million nationwide in August. That is up 17% from the same month last year. Realtor.com experts pointed out that many of the “low-priced” mansions are in older industrial cities in Midwest and South. Among the 10 cities with the most affordable mansions are Indianapolis, Kansas City and Louisville.

A caution from Realtor.com is that most of the inexpensive large homes in these cities are also old. Buyers can assume that these will require investments to put them into “move-in” condition.

Realtor.com’s just-released study, “Massive Homes, Mini Prices: The 10 U.S. Cities With the Most Affordable Mansions,” lists homes by median price per city and median price per square foot.
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The city with the most affordable mansions is Indianapolis, one of the oldest large industrial cities in the Midwest. The city is relatively poor, with a median household income of $49,661, according to the Census Bureau. That is well below the national number. The 15.8% poverty rate is high.

The Indianapolis “mansion” price is $845,000. Many of these homes were built just after 1900, when the city was home to a number of industrialists who ran companies like Eli Lilly.

Click here to see which cities have the most expensive homes.
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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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