While home-price growth in the U.S. has slowed to its slowest pace since 2012, up an average of 4.4 percent, year-over-year, the median single-family home sale price within the San Jose metro area, which includes Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, increased 11.3 percent from the first to second quarter of 2014.

And with a median sale price of $899,500 for existing single-family homes, San Jose remains the most expensive major metropolitan housing market in the United States, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The San Francisco metropolitan area, which includes Oakland and Fremont, remains the second most expensive housing market in the U.S. with a median single-family home sale price of $769,600, 13.2 percent higher than in the first quarter of the year.

Honolulu, which was the most expensive metro area in 2011 and the third most expensive last quarter, slipped to fourth most expensive with a median price of $678,500, passed by the Anaheim/Santa Ana, California metro area at $691,900.  San Diego rounded out the top five most expensive housing markets with a median price of $504,200.

The five lowest-cost major metropolitan areas in the second quarter of the year were Youngstown Ohio (median single-family home sale price of $78,600); Rockford, Illinois ($85,300); Elmira, New York ($87,800); Decatur, Illinois ($90,900); and Toledo, Ohio ($95,900).

14 thoughts on “Most Expensive Metro Area In The US? San Jose. San Francisco #2”
  1. interesting that 49’ers new owner Jed York’s hometown Youngstown Ohio is in the lowest cost area and where he moved the 49ers to are in the highest cost area of the US. Too bad Eddie D lost the niners to the putz York family. Santa Clara 49ers! Not!

  2. An MSA is supposed to encompass a job core and the outer area that provides net commute into the core. In the bay area the two dominant job centers are downtown SF and the valley roughly centered on Sunnyvale.

    Both San Mateo and Alameda counties have a higher net outflow of commuters to SF than to the valley, so they are in the SF MSA.

  3. These MSA comparisons always leave me with an “apples vs. pears” feeling. The SF MSA is so heterogeneous with dense northeast SF lumped in with sprawling Fremont. About the only solid conclusion you can make here is “urban coastal California is expensive”.

  4. I am just now at the airport lounge in Moscow and let me contribute (a little off topic) that cost of living in SF/SJ are NOTHING compared to Russia. But Russia is also a ton of fun to visit … so you pretty much get what you pay for.

  5. Brazil can also be extremely epensive. The top ten percent (our 1% plus the relatively small professional classes) have to pay a lot for modest apartments. Many people cannot participate at all in the housing market, so they build favella shacks. As bad as a favella is, however, is being forced to move into a government housing project (poorly constructed and far from jobs) a better solution? Brazil has an interesting “free market” approach to low income housing!

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