More than $1 million
It's been 44 years since Huntington Beach broker Rick Caruso sold his first home to a first-time buyer. It was a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house with two stories and just over 1,600 square feet. The new owner — an auto painter with a stay-at-home wife and two small children — paid $44,000 for it in 1978.
In the intervening decades, the value of that one-time starter home soared almost thirtyfold.
In June 2022, an identical model next door sold for $1.29 million.
Does Caruso see any car painters among today's first-time buyers?
“No. They're smart kids with a good job and they're connected to family. Or, they're entrepreneurs, often with the tech industry,” he said. “(Firsttime buyers) are moving to condos and town homes — or they're moving to mobile homes.”
Bill and Lisa Cramer bought their first California home in 2001, trading two years of apartment living for a new three-bedroom, 2 ½-bath detached condo in Irvine's Northpark community. Their agent, Matthew Ingalls, described the condo as “a little box” and “a prototypical starter home.”
The Cramers paid $353,500, then sold it for $695,000 in 2005 to move back to their home state of Ohio.
On July 13, however, another couple paid $1.275 million to buy that same “little box.”
“Wow,” Cramer, 52, said of the latest sales price. “That would be a real tough one for a first-time homeowner to get into.”
In 2016, Daniel and Katelyn Irvin paid $362,500 for their first home, a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom town home in Laguna Niguel. When their first son was born, they picked up and moved to a house in Mission Viejo.
Their starter home, meanwhile, has almost doubled in value in the past seven years. According to Redfin, similar units in the complex are now valued as high as $652,000.
“I don't know if ridiculous is the right word, but it's crazy,” Daniel Irvin, 37, said recently. “At the time when we bought it, it was in that price range of affordability. … Where it's priced at now, that's something we wouldn't have been able to afford.”