From summer resorts to wealthy suburbs, a look at the most expensive small US towns
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Residents of America's most expensive small town get by without a chain store or even a traffic light. The town has one gas station, an elementary school, a community center, a general store, dairy and vegetable farms, and some restaurants and inns that open during the warm seasons.
Median home value is $2.237 million in Chilmark, a small town on Martha's Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod. The town is home to 953 year-round residents, but the population swells dramatically during the summer when the rich and famous-including Seinfeld creator Larry David and actor Ted Danson-settle in for the summer. Chilmark, which includes the 300-year-old fishing village of Menemsha, has only 1,700 homes, many of them expensive vacation properties, and is the second-least densely populated town on the island. Houses rarely go on sale here, but when they do prices are high. On Sept. 12 a buyer paid $13.8 million for eight acres with a nine-bedroom home on it. In July, another buyer paid $15 million for 27 acres of land near the town's beautiful Squibnocket Beach.
Businessweek.com worked with Zillow.com to come up with a list of the 32 smallest towns with the highest home values and selected one property per Metropolitan Statistical Area, a geographical designation used by the U.S. Census, because otherwise the list would have nearly entirely dominated by towns near New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
These are places with a restricted supply of real estate, much of which has been passed on from generation to generation in the same families. Residents want a small-town experience, and they are willing to pay higher taxes to keep it that way. These towns rarely have tax revenue from malls and office complexes to dip into.
The question remains whether these places will continue to take advantage of their buoyant property values into 2009. While it's true that most of these communities have relatively few homes, and commensurately small turnover, what is fair to say is that by this time next year the list could be completely different. The reason is that inclusion is reflective of sales. If homes fail to sell, or prices come down, the town on this list may well be replaced by others next year. All it takes is one really big sale to change the results.
Median home value is $2.237 million in Chilmark, a small town on Martha's Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod. The town is home to 953 year-round residents, but the population swells dramatically during the summer when the rich and famous-including Seinfeld creator Larry David and actor Ted Danson-settle in for the summer. Chilmark, which includes the 300-year-old fishing village of Menemsha, has only 1,700 homes, many of them expensive vacation properties, and is the second-least densely populated town on the island. Houses rarely go on sale here, but when they do prices are high. On Sept. 12 a buyer paid $13.8 million for eight acres with a nine-bedroom home on it. In July, another buyer paid $15 million for 27 acres of land near the town's beautiful Squibnocket Beach.
Businessweek.com worked with Zillow.com to come up with a list of the 32 smallest towns with the highest home values and selected one property per Metropolitan Statistical Area, a geographical designation used by the U.S. Census, because otherwise the list would have nearly entirely dominated by towns near New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
These are places with a restricted supply of real estate, much of which has been passed on from generation to generation in the same families. Residents want a small-town experience, and they are willing to pay higher taxes to keep it that way. These towns rarely have tax revenue from malls and office complexes to dip into.
The question remains whether these places will continue to take advantage of their buoyant property values into 2009. While it's true that most of these communities have relatively few homes, and commensurately small turnover, what is fair to say is that by this time next year the list could be completely different. The reason is that inclusion is reflective of sales. If homes fail to sell, or prices come down, the town on this list may well be replaced by others next year. All it takes is one really big sale to change the results.