Prospective buyers in Anaheim looking to get a “starter home” with a 30-year mortgage at current rates need at least $251,000 in annual household income, the most of any city in Southern California.
The data from Redfin shows Anaheim as third-highest in the nation for income requirements, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
California dominated the upper ranks of the list. San Jose ranked No. 1 with an annual threshold on household income of $300,000. San Francisco was second at $285,000, followed by Anaheim, with San Diego in the fourth spot ($198,000), Oakland in fifth (194,000) and Los Angeles in seventh ($184,000).
The report is based on Redfin’s definition of “starter home.” The online brokerage divides the housing market into five sectors based on median prices, with an upper 5 percent. In between the highest and lowest are three sections of 30 percent each.
The analysis for the study considers homes priced between the 5th and 35th percentile, essentially ruling out the bottom 5 percent as candidates for flips and other outliers. It assumes a down payment of 3.5 percent — the minimum for a loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration — with the buyer figuring 30 percent household income to go toward housing costs.
The annual income needed to get a starter house exceeds the median incomes in each of the markets. It’s also double in Anaheim, where the median income is around $122,000, according to Redfin.
The bar for annual income in Southern California has risen over the past year as the median sales price for a single-family house in the region was $808,000 as of July, up 2.7 percent from a year earlier.
Prices have risen in part due to lack of inventory. That trend has hit particularly hard in high-priced markets due to the prevalence of a “lock-in effect” that has homeowners staying in properties longer in order to keep loans taken during the era of rock-bottom interest rates that were the norm for more than a decade before the increases of the past two years.