Kanye West bought a house in Malibu for 57 million and this pretty much confirms how important location is to real estate.
The house itself is 3,665 square feet.
The average home is 1,764 square feet.
The average US home is estimated to be worth $293,000.
People are paying $164 per square foot.
Kanye West on a four bedroom beach front home is spending a little over $15,500 a square foot.
94.5x what the average American home owner is paying.
I wanted to look at Malibu a little closer and found the average price is 3.7 million dollars on a year average and in August of 2021, the average sale was 4.1 million.
14x the average value of a US home.
Currently Mississippi has the cheapest housing prices, at $114,000.
Malibu is 36x the price of Mississippi.
So why is Malibu so expensive?
For Malibu as a whole, I don’t see this as a testament to how great it is, but how actively the people there have worked to fight anyone new coming in if they aren’t a celebrity or billionaire.
Malibu has 27,000 acres of land in it.
19.9 millions
The population is 12,600 people.
7,778 homes exist there.
Santa Monica is 18 miles away.
Much smaller at 8.4 miles.
51,000 people total
Home price of 1.9 million on average.
Santa Monica is more building friendly versus Malibu and Malibu has worked hard to create a fixed supply of housing to hold prices high.
Obviously Malibu is a luxury place to live, but this is an example of a lot of the United States.
San Francisco had a laundromat which wanted to convert into an apartment complex and add housing for hundreds of people.
1.2 million dollars spent on legal fees and was defeated by the city in an attempt to do something which would cut cost. This wasn’t an attempt to preserve San Francisco or help anyone, but an attempt to help those who have real estate keep it valuable.
Malibu is sort of the national example for this, where they could easily add more housing, add thousands of residents and cut prices down dramatically, but the 12,000 residents don’t want to see that happen.
This practice is largely why the Bay Area, Manhattan & many other places are so hard to live in.