How Much Home Can You Buy In Austin For $200K?

AUSTIN, TX — Location is key when looking to buy a home, but price and size also are major factors. Given such considerations, a new study explores how much house you would get for $200,000 in the largest US cities.

The upshot: It turns out a home buyer with $200,000 to spend on a home can get about 11 times more house in Austin than in Manhattan— 1,341 square feet in the former versus 126 square feet for the latter, according to the PropertyShark study. Other cities in Texas — namely El Paso and San Antonio — also are on the affordable side of the spectrum, offering about 10 times more house for $200k than San Jose, Calif., Boston or San Francisco.

Which yields the question: For $200,000, would you rather buy a box in Manhattan or a mansion in San Antonio?

Comparing home prices in major U.S. cities and seeing mind-blowing differences isn’t anything new, analysts noted, but there’s something about this topic that made them curious. To reach comparisons, researchers looked at how much space one could buy for the approximate U.S. national median home price of $200,000 in some of the largest cities in the country.

"It turns out, not as much as you would expect in some places," researchers wrote. "While the results were indeed astonishing, we didn’t think there would be such a huge discrepancy between the most expensive and least expensive cities. So, if you’re in the market to buy a place with a decent floor plan, and which doesn’t involve winning the lottery, check out our rundown below."

To find out how Austin stacks up against all other cities in the study, click here.

Elsewhere in the country, there were some interesting findings:

• Cleveland offers the most bang for the buck in terms of home size: a 3,769-square-foot mansion there could be gotten for the price of a 126-square-foot Manhattan studio.
• For the same amount of money, a home in Orlando, Fla. or Tucson, Ariz. would offer a homeowner around 2,000 square feet of living space, while in Los Angeles or San Diego a person can only buy a 500-square-foot home with $200,000.

>>> Uppermost image via Shutterstock, graphic above courtesy of PropertyShark