San Diego was one of the least-affordable U.S. metro areas for buying a home in the second quarter, said a recently-released study from mortgage website HSH.
Potential buyers needed to make $130,986 a year to afford the median-priced single-family house.
Only two other metro areas were less affordable — San Jose and San Francisco — said the study, which crunched numbers for 50 regions across the United States.
HSH determined rankings by looking at quarterly home price data, local property taxes, homeowner insurance costs and income needed to qualify for a loan. It also assumed that prospective homebuyers made a 20 percent down payment.
The most affordable metropolitan area was Pittsburgh where the required annual salary to afford a median-priced home was $38,253. Other affordable cities for homebuyers were Cleveland ($39,253), Oklahoma City ($40,780).
Keith Gumbinger, HSH.com’s vice president, said rising mortgage rates are only a small part of the difficulty for potential buyers.
“Unfortunately, even if rates don’t go up very much,” he said, “part of the issue we run into is that home prices are rising so quickly.”
San Diego has been locked at the No.3 spot since HSH expanded the study to 50 metros three years ago. Los Angeles was No.4, which usually is seen as less affordable than America’s Finest City — but Gumbinger said the larger pool of homes in Los Angeles reduced the median cost in comparison to San Diego.
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