Back in 1978.....

[fortyshooter]

Found a long lost picture of our first home we bought in 1976 with my daily driver 1969 Dodge Dart GTS with 340 and 4 spd. My wife had spotted it in a trailer park parked under a tree with FOR SALE sign in window on her way home from work. 500 bucks later I was driving it home and I made sure I thanked her! In picture we had just sold the house getting ready to move in soon to a new home we had built. We were 24 years young at that time.
Kept the Dart until 1990 when I sold it for a good sum.

[Hatchdog]

Wow, 500 bucks for that car! Well at that time I can only guess what you sold your home for but probably 30K or so? I bought my first home in 1978, a tiny two bed one bath no basement and paid 23K. Hey…..I was in a tiny house before tiny houses were a “thing”.

[Mags]

Our first home, same time period $17.1K. Small 3 bedroom 1200 sq ft home sitting on 1/3 acre. Sold it a few years later for $49K.

[fortyshooter]

Wow, 500 bucks for that car! Well at that time I can only guess what you sold your home for but probably 30K or so? I bought my first home in 1978, a tiny two bed one bath no basement and paid 23K. Hey…..I was in a tiny house before tiny houses were a “thing”.

Great guess Hatch....$ 32500 ! The lot it was on was 60 ft. wide but 410 ft long!

[BrokenolMarine]

I bought my first house in NC in 1980, I had just made Corporal. It was a 3br 1 ba on a 3/4ac corner lot in Jacksonville. It was halfway between Camp Lejeune and the New River Air Station where I was assigned. I paid just over $20,000. The Pie Shaped lot was inside a Dead Man's Curve, and I rented the two extra rooms to two of my shop mates from the Avionics shop who had been renting a really terrible single wide trailer in a noisy trashy trailer park. Their rent, (At half their rate in the trailer park) was 2/3 of my house payment. They paid 2/3 of the utilities and food and we had it made. I was NOT a party animal, they WENT to parties, we didn't throw them. Our neighborhood was a quiet residential neighborhood and we fit in.

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My 65 T-bird is in the carport, the roommate was washing his car in the grass. My other roommate was dating a Colonel's daughter and was gone a lot, until the Colonel found out. Then he wasn't.

In 1982 I got orders to a Search and Rescue Squadron at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station in Hawaii, and sold the house in less than a month. I made about $3000 since I priced it to sell. Not bad for the time period.

Funny thing, because of the curve, you could stand in my yard and see these signs.

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They were visible from either leg of the curve. The old retired block layer across the street had the hedge row, and a low decorative brick wall with an intricate pattern hidden in the snow in that pic behind the signs. Two or three times a year, someone would MISS the curve, jump the ditchline, and plow through the hedge row and take out a section of the decorative fence line. Rather than get upset, the old man would smile.

He would go out and count the hedges he had to replace, measure the length of the brick fence line, and pull out the insurance forms and start filling in the blanks. The insurance companies were familiar with the process and would cut him a check. He'd drive to the garden center and buy the new plants and plant them. Clean up the busted section of bricks, mix up the mortar, and go behind the house where he had two pallets of brick, and rebuild the decorative fence.

Then deposit the check, and wait for the next 2am crash. He MADE a decent amount every time it happened. The wall wasn't strong enough to cause injury, but ... he made money and enjoyed the work... so he kept rebuilding the wall.

[Sir Henry]

We paid $57K for a house in 1980 and sold it for $65K in 1987. That same year we bought another house for $177.5K. I sold it in 2021 for $1.4M. I bought this place in Wisconsin for $264.8K. Then I bought another 20 acres and with the RVport and new 30’x 50’ garage I’ll have about $400K into it. Still way ahead of what I sold for in the Seattle area.

Some of the neighbors houses in Washington are now going for $1.6 to $1.8M.

[dave77]

Crazy real estate prices in King County and they're getting that way over here. I feel sorry for young people that aren't making big money, their not likely to ever be able to buy a nice home.

https://seatoday.6amcity.com/bellevue-h ... ting-price
"In fact, since Jan. 1, 2021 — 10 residential properties in King County have sold for $1 million or more above the asking price. All of them were on the Eastside: six in Mercer Island, two in Kirkland, and two in Bellevue.

More numbers to gawk at (data courtesy of Windermere Real Estate):

The highest sale price over listing was a Mercer Island place purchased last March. It started at $3.998,000 and went for $6,650,000 — 66.33% over list price.
Nine out of these ten homes sold last year during the spring and summer — the other home in Kirkland sold in October.
The lowest original listing price was $2,350,000 and the highest was $7,980,000 (this eventually sold for $9,842,400, or 23.34% over listing) "

[Sir Henry]

Crazy real estate prices in King County and they're getting that way over here. I feel sorry for young people that aren't making big money, their not likely to ever be able to buy a nice home.

https://seatoday.6amcity.com/bellevue-h ... ting-price
"In fact, since Jan. 1, 2021 — 10 residential properties in King County have sold for $1 million or more above the asking price. All of them were on the Eastside: six in Mercer Island, two in Kirkland, and two in Bellevue.

More numbers to gawk at (data courtesy of Windermere Real Estate):

The highest sale price over listing was a Mercer Island place purchased last March. It started at $3.998,000 and went for $6,650,000 — 66.33% over list price.
Nine out of these ten homes sold last year during the spring and summer — the other home in Kirkland sold in October.
The lowest original listing price was $2,350,000 and the highest was $7,980,000 (this eventually sold for $9,842,400, or 23.34% over listing) "

Yes multimillion dollar houses and the parks just blocks away are littered with needles and I don’t mean the kind from evergreens.

The prices are all fueled by what the locals call BMW’s -Boeing, Microsoft, and Weyerhaeuser. If you undue all the Microsoft stock splits the original IPO was eleven cents a share. Imagine throwing $1K into Microsoft in 1985. Today it would be worth around $4M. Several hundred thousand people from Seattle did just that.

And then you have the young people that think working at McDonald’s is a career and want $20 an hour. Or they are college students with $200K student debt and can’t get a job in their chosen careers. Meanwhile electricians and plumbers are making $80 an hour with all the overtime they want.

Okay I’ll get off my soapbox.