If Not Here, Then There? Get a Posh Address at a Discount

by Amey Stone (RSS feed)
Apr 7th 2008 at 6:00PM

Ever wish you could buy a home in a place like Nantucket, Mass. or Palm Beach, Fla., but found it out of your range? Such posh locales come at premium prices. Many people decide to settle for less just to have a stakehold in a top address.

Or you could try another route: Find a neighborhood that is nearly as nice as the one you aspire to, but that comes at a discount.

Real estate research firm Neighborhood Scout, did a fascinating study that turned up great fodder for such a search. We used the findings to identify some great new estates of the day here at Luxist, which we will be featuring later this month, and AOL's real estate channel put together this photo gallery). Neighborhood Scout's founder Dr. Andrew Schiller and his team used their "match" feature to trove their database of neighborhood metrics to come up with locales that have many of the same attributes of the poshest places, but offer a steep discount in real estate values.

So, for example, if you want Nantucket, but can't afford it, try Southwest Harbor, Maine. Schiller finds both "quaint, sophisticated, nautical," but Southwest Harbor comes at an 83% discount to Nantucket. Want Malibu? Try Madison, Conn. instead. The median home price there is $650,000 vs. nearly $3 million in Malibu.

Filed under: Estates