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Comment by slaw | Hacker News Reader

Could you point me to these plenty cheap areas? I work remotely and may consider moving there.

Around here in the North East of UK you can easily buy a house for around £100k. It won't be amazing or anything, but with banks offering 5% deposit mortgages pretty much anyone can save up for it and get on the property ladder. Of course the situation down south is completely different and the closer you get to London the more impossible it gets to ever buy your house.

The trouble is even that is a challenge outside of the London job market

For comparison that’s about 5 times minimum wage at 35 hours a week. You’d struggle to get a mortgage on your own without a £20k deposit but as a couple certainly no problem, and many entry jobs in supermarkets etc pay more than minimum wage.

You can buy flats in beautiful, historic city centre in Bytom, Poland for $500 per square meter. There are even well-paying coding jobs in the area (within 30 minutes by car or public transport).

> Could you point me to these plenty cheap areas? I work remotely and may consider moving there.

They are all over. Head over to zillow/redfin (or the corresponding real estate site for your region) to see them. They won't be in the hip city center everyone wants, but choices are plentiful if one is willing to sacrifice a few wishlist items.

"Cheap" is of course relative the the region/country so actual numbers will vary. I'm in California so I can give a California-centric answer.

Browsing zillow I see over 30 condo (and a few house) units for less than 200K in the Sacramento areas (not exactly the boonies, it's the state capital).

In the Fresno area I see around 60 units (many houses) under 200K. Some friends moved to Fresno and they have a very nice place, for pennies on the dollar compared to San Francisco.

For those who don't want a big city, head north of Sacramento towards Oregon and tons of choices to work remote and buy a place cheap.

Mind you, I set the search limit to <200K, but that's extremely cheap by California standards. Even 25 years ago 200K was a cheap house in California. If you increase the search criteria to a more reasonable 300-400K there are way more choices and areas.

200k is not cheap.

$200k is about $1200/month for the mortgage, taxes, and insurance.

Plenty of cheap areas, in many countries. Just have to give up things like jobs and services(both public and private). But they do exist. And aren't desirable for exactly those reasons.

In Sweden if you move from Stockholm to Eskilstuna (1h30m drive away) you can find a 5 room 100 sqm apartment in the dead center of the town for the price of a 2 room 45-50 sqm apartment in any of the immediate suburbs of Stockholm.

Or, to put it simply, move out of the big city, and the prices drop by a factor of two or more.

That's true in Germany as well, but to get cheap property, you have to go very far from the city, and Germany not being that huge, you'll be close to the next metro area by then.

Like, sure, a 120sqm house might be 400k in Hamburg and only 230k 60 minutes out to the north west (both needing an additional 25-50% of price in renovation costs), but the average net income is 30k/year and you're expected to have at least 20% in cash.

You can get very cheap houses in Saxony or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but there will be little to no infrastructure (like, the next gynaecologist might be a 60 minute car trip away), your neighbors will be down on their luck, unemployed and voting far right, and you'll essentially need to rebuild the house - and you'll need to do much of it yourself because the tradesmen work on construction sites in the big cities and rarely take local jobs.

We've been living in Berlin for the last 10 year and the prices are making me consider looking outside the city (no other big cities that near Berlin, so there isn't that challenge you speak of).

My main issue would be being more socially isolated as all of our local friends are in Berlin, kids having to adapt to new school/kindergarten (& find new friends), new work for my wife who doesn't work remote (but can find work relatively easily)...It's not impossible but it really sucks that we'd have to leave the city if we want a slightly bigger home (we've 2 kids who share a room & our apartment is in general feeling a bit small for a family of 4).

Without a large windfall I don't think we'll ever be able to afford buying a 3+ bedroom (4+ rooms as Germans count it) home in Berlin & rent would be high enough that no landlord will want us with our current income.

Yeah, doing it with kids is extra hard. I have friends in Berlin who moved to Prenzlauer Berg in like 2005 and got a great deal. At some point, with kids that apartment just didn't cut it any more, but they can't move too far for the reasons you mention, so they looked long and hard and accepted paying quite a bit more and moving to the other side of the Ring in Pankow. Not as nice, but close enough to keep the kids in the same schools.

I had hoped that remote work would relieve some of that pressure, but maybe it'll take a generation because many couples can't move anywhere because only one of them can work remotely, or because they don't want to uproot their kids. Not to mention that you'll still need a solid internet connection to work remotely, and that's still hit and miss if you go more rural. And if nobody wants to move to Saxony, the empty villages there don't really do anything on the supply side.

I have many friends in Brandenburg (the state, not the city) and internet speeds tend to actually be great out there from what Ive heard (still in the towns/cities not literally in the middle of nowhere, but there are loads of small to mid sized towns). In fact I believe it may be better than in Berlin!

I wonder if it was because it was easier to upgrade/replace the East German infrastructure & as such it's relatively new/good? Sorta like how nice a lot of the highway network in Poland is, because it was mostly only built in the last couple decades.

BTW Pankow is considered a very nice and desirable (and expensive) part of Berlin to raise a family in :)

I guess Pankow is also pretty large. The parts I stayed at had mostly wide streets with lots of traffic, but it includes Prenzlauer Berg and goes all the way to the north, so it'll have plenty of different places. And gentrification likely changes it as well.

You're right about small towns, they're probably a good compromise before looking at villages, but it is a very different life style, so probably not for everyone that currently lives in Berlin or Hamburg by choice. I'm curious how it will develop, and I feel fortunate that my personal preferences align with what's cheaper. I feel for those who desire the hustle and bustle of the inner city.

This is all well and good but are there jobs there that match the persons skillset or would they have to spend most likely 3-6 years retraining?

The question above was "I work remotely and may consider moving there."

When you work remotely you may want to move anywhere you want. However, there are other things to consider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408256 :)

I missed that, sometimes the threads get long on here!

I like to browse the real estate market just for fun sometimes and actually yes there are cheap areas in every country. Some are cheap due to remoteness, due to inventory or mismanagement/decline. Like in mentioned in another comment, (south) Spain has incredibly cheap properties because there are many available and mortgages are available to even non-residents (not necessarily _in_ cities, but within a 30 min radius from population centers). Generally speaking 15 minutes inland from the sea is cheap everywhere (apart from luxury pockets like Marbella), you can easily buy a nice mediterranean villa for less than 200k. If you want views that's around 250-300k.

Something I learned too late is that sometimes a place is cheap because of horrible neighbours.

That's not really a factor here as most of the housing stock is made up of holiday homes so you only have neighbors for like 2 weeks in a year. But with remote work many more are making it their homes so it might be a problem in the future.

More generally, cheap areas often means economic underdevelopment or decline, which leads to social problems and annoying neighbors (on account of drinking, unemployment and other issues). On the plus side, there's less traffic, because people aren't as busy going to places to make and spend money as they are in economically vibrant areas.

It also means that there’s less money available for infrastructure maintenance. While a city is expanding, the majority of the housing is occupied, and the infrastructure to support new housing doesn’t yet require replacement. As a city contracts, there are more unoccupied houses and vacant lots. There’s still the same length of water, sewage, and power lines along the length of a street, but fewer residents to pay for it as it becomes old enough to need repairs/replacement.

Are these properties 'cheap' because of they can be stolen easily by okupas?

If you're in the USA, the Rio Grande Valley is pretty cheap. Because it's next to Mexico, there's huge amounts of Latino culture & influence.

If you want to be somewhere that feels on the up & up and has cool stuff, Brownsville has a decent amount of engineers for SpaceX and you can go watch launches from a public beach if you get there early enough.

You can get a house on a few acres (does need a little work but nothing crazy) in Tipperary for ~200k.

200k is not cheap.

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