When looking for a first home, people take a lot of things into consideration, but where you’re house hunting could play a major role in whether that home search is an easy or difficult one. Well, BankRate has just come out with their picks for the Best and Worst Cities for First-Time Home Buyers, so if you’re looking, you may want to listen up.
The site determined their list by judging the nation’s 50 largest metro areas on 13 measures related to affordability, culture, job market, market tightness and safety, using data from a variety of sources including Realtor.com, the U.S. Census Buruea, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reportig Program and more.
With all this in mind, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania tops the list as the best city for first-time homebuyers, followed by Raleigh, North Carolina and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. All the cities in the Top Five have employment rates near or below the national average of 3.7%, with median listing prices below $294,800, which is the national median price.
Ten Best Cities For First Time Homebuyers
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Raleigh, NC
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Hartford, CT
- St. Louis, MO
- Cincinnati, OH
- Buffalo, NY
- Minneapolis, MN
- Kansas City, MO
- Virginia Beach, VA
On the flipside, San Francisco, California is the worst place for first-time homebuyers, followed by Los Angeles, and Sacramento. California is so bad, six cities in the state rank in the Top Ten. Just how bad is it in these cities? Well, in the Top Five worst metro areas, houses stayed on the market, on average, between 27 and 41 days, which isn’t a lot. Also, homes in the five worst areas were anywhere from one-and-a-half times to three-and-a-half times that of the national median average.
Ten Worst Cities For First Time Homebuyers
- San Francisco, CA
- Los Angeles, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- San Jose, CA
- Seattle, WA
- San Bernardino, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Las Vegas, NV
- Miami, FL
- Memphis, TN
Source:BankRate