The Real Price of a Home in Utah

Hardly anyone enjoys a great bargain more than I do. In preparing for the future, I've frequently googled and asked the question,

Where is the most affordable place to live in Utah?

Groceries, local taxes, utilities, and many other things effect your cost of living. The biggest factor though, is housing. My biggest problem however, is that when researching the cheapest place to buy a home, the same thing always happens. An article will simply least where the cheapest homes are. However, a cheap home is not always a well valued home.

Cheap homes tend to be built on small lots,

have little square footage, and are very old.

But how can we determine the true value of a home when accounting for its age, lot size, square footage, etc?

Rob Shelton of Lehi Free Press states,

"27% of Utah adults are living with their parents and 75% of ALL Utahns don’t make enough yearly to afford the average median home cost of roughly $500,000" (source)

I confirmed this by my own visualization and analysis using Utah's Housing Unit Inventory (found here). After cleaning up some outliers and missing data, I found that indeed, the median home tends to be around $500,000.

I refer you to a small example to illustrate this point:

Big house costs big money.

But what if Big house costs little money?

Obviously, if someone bought the same house as you and it were built in the same year, same square footage, lot size, etc. but paid $50,000 less than you, he got the better value. So our main question is which cities within Utah have killer deals on homes when compared to the rest of the homes within the state?

Without calculating value,

We can find the following statistics:

Most Expensive Homes: North Salt Lake

Least Expensive Homes: Wendover

There's very obviously a hot center in major metropolitan areas (i.e. Salt Lake, Provo, Park City, etc.)

Now, we can perform a multiple linear regression using various factors discussed earlier to determine what the expected average value for a home in various cities would be vs. what the actual average value is in reality. Doing so yields us the following results:

Purchasing a home in North Salt Lake means you lose roughly $550,000 in buying power! Compare that to Wendover where you gain $275,000!

While the top and bottom 2 of my chart here reflect the already very expensive and very cheap cities respectively, it's worth noting a city like Alpine (where home prices are very high) actually ends up being balanced by the fact that the homes are quite spacious and newer.

We can see here that of course the median home value plays a huge role. However, while homes are cheaper in Brigham City, due to how old and small the homes are, you actually recieve a better value purchasing that same home in Goshen or Santaquin.

Here are the full results of the best value analysis:

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