In its survey released Tuesday of the best cities in the country for first-time home buyers, the personal finance website WalletHub ranked four Virginia cities in the top 10, including Chesapeake, which it ranked as the best city in the entire country for new homeowners.
To determine the most favorable housing markets for first-time buyers, WalletHub took the pulse of real estate in 300 cities of varying sizes using 22 key metrics. The data set ranges from housing affordability to real-estate tax rate to property-crime rate.
In addition to Chesapeake’s coming in at the top of the heap, WalletHub ranked Hampton, Va., as the sixth-best market for first-time home buyers, Virginia Beach as No. eight, and Norfolk, Va., as No. nine.
In a telling statistic, the website’s bottom nine (293-300) as the worst locations in the country for first-time home buyers to be looking for a home are all in California.
In another telling statistic, WalletHub reported that in 2020, 40% of all U.S. single-family home purchases were made by first-time buyers, and 14% more people became first-time buyers than the previous year. This growth, the website said, is due in part to the fact that interest rates dropped dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The website noted that where a home is located is just as important as what features it has. An unpleasant neighborhood can sour the experience of a great home. Potential buyers may want to narrow their search down to an area with a good reputation before getting into housing details.
So WalletHub stepped in to simplify the process, comparing 300 cities across 22 key indicators and three dimensions of market attractiveness, affordability, and quality of life.
The indicators used in the affordability dimension were housing affordability, the average cost of homeowners insurance, the cost of living, the cost per square foot, and the real-estate tax rate.
In the real-estate market attractiveness dimension, WalletHub used the rent-to-price ratio, the median days on the market, the median home-price appreciation, the foreclosure rate, the share of housing units built between 2010 and 2019, the extent of the building-permit activity (the number of unit permits per 1,000 residents), the number of mortgage lenders per capita, the number of real estate agents per capita, and the homeownership rate for millennials.
In the third dimension, that of the city’s quality of life, WalletHub drew its conclusions by using its list of states that are recovering the quickest from COVID-19, the quality of the weather, the quality of the school system, driver friendliness, the state of the job market, total home-energy cost, the violent-crime rate, and the property-crime rate.
