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Investing > Real Estate Investments
Pre-1920 houses: No garage, one bathroom, costly repairs
GENARO C. ARMAS, Associated Press Writer. Associated Press.
Copyright Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The typical house built before 1920 comes with no garage, one bathroom and a big repair bill.
But there's an upside: The median price is just $99,000, a far cry from the $183,500 for a home built since 1990, according to recently released Census Bureau statistics.
About 8 percent of the nation's 106 million homes in 2001 were at least 84 years old. The biggest concentration was in the Northeast, where 19 percent of homes are that old.
"In the Northeast and the New York metropolitan area, there is such a severe housing shortage that whether the house is young or old, a prospective home-buyer will be glad to move in if there is an opportunity," said Lawrence Yun, an economist at the National Association of Realtors.
That, he said, defies the general rule in the home-buying market: "The newer it is, the easier it sells."
The West had the highest median prices for older ($171,000) and newer homes ($217,000), while the Midwest had the lowest price among older homes ($87,000) and the South among newer dwellings ($163,000).
Owners of old homes usually run up higher bills for common problems like leaky pipes or faulty electrical wiring _ about $509 annually compared to $338 for fix-it jobs in new homes.
Bigger remodeling jobs cost more, too. For instance, the average kitchen remodeling project costs about $7,200 in an older home, more than $2,000 more than in a newer home, according to the census report based on 2001 data.
The expenses aren't of great concern to Elisabeth Ginsburg, a writer who owns a Victorian house built in 1882 in Glen Ridge, N.J., a New York City suburb. Ginsburg, former president of the town's historical society, said half of Glen Ridge's homes were built before 1920.
She's rebuilt her house's main staircase and renovated the dining room.
"There's something to be said about older construction, the detail," she said. "And just the fact that there is a history in this house."
A typical pre-1920 home is 1,862 square feet, about 300 smaller than newer homes, and they are far less likely to have more than one bathroom. And since few Americans owned cars prior 1920, homes built before then typically don't have a garage.
Howard Decker, chief curator of the National Building Museum in Washington, said older homes bring character to a neighborhood but often get sacrificed by developers looking to build bigger, more expensive houses with more modern amenities.
"Unfortunately, we are used to going through neighborhoods that are a sea of nothing but two-car garages," he said.
On the Net: Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ nationaldata.html Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Dateline: WASHINGTON
Text Word Count 438
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