In the 1955-1960 television program The Millionaire, the millionaire John Beresford Tipton would call his secretary, Michael Anthony, into his drawing room. In a booming voice, he would utter the following, handing his assistant an envelope, “Mike, our next millionaire …” Mike would then set off to find the lucky recipient and we would watch as his or her life would be forever transformed.
Ah, what a dream! So we thought we’d have some fun and go shopping with that mythical cool one mil. Let’s see what we can buy.
When it comes to fancy goods, I shopped the Internet and found you can buy either one Bugatti Veyron automobile, a Hublot Big Bang watch, two meetings with Apple CEO, Tim Cook or a bottle of DKNY Golden Delicious perfume adorned with almost 3,000 precious stones.
OK, enough of this foolishness. Let’s talk real estate. We took a trip around the world to shop for properties around $1 million. It’s all location, location, location, of course, and you get a lot more for your money in some out of the way spots.
A million will buy you a castle in Eastern Europe or a nine bedroom country estate in the Highlands of Scotland. When it comes to the fashionable cities of Europe, though, well, not so much. You’ll be able to land a 909 square foot apartment in London, which is pretty good when you compare it to the 635 square foot one bedroom you can get for the same money in Paris. In Tokyo you can do a little better with a 1,300 square foot multilevel home and then again in Bangkok you will get a lot of bang for your buck with a five bedroom, six bath single family home.
Turning to the U.S., you’ll find no surprises here. New York, New York, pricey yes. Including all five boroughs, the average per square foot price is $424 but if you take Manhattan alone the price soars to over $1,500 per square foot. A million will buy you about a 650 square foot one bedroom and don’t expect it to have a view. San Francisco comes in at $665 a foot, Boston at $478, L.A., San Diego and Long Beach, California at about $350-$400. At the very bottom we find Detroit, so down on its luck that it is reported you can buy a place for as little as $12 a square foot, the latter is pretty amazing, as it now costs close to $200 a square foot for new construction, and that’s not anything fancy.
One needs a lot of cash to buy a $1 million property. Even if you are financing a jumbo mortgage, the bank will probably require about a 30 percent down payment, or $300,000, not to mention closing and escrow costs, which can be considerable. The monthly mortgage alone will be approx. $5,000.
So for those of us, not being visited by Mike Anthony, $1 million is an unachievable dream. Thank goodness for alternatives. If you happen not to be in the upper echelons, there’s always Bangkok, Detroit, Eastern Europe … why even Cleveland might do.
Del Phillips is a California Licensed Real Estate agent. He is a member of the National, California and San Diego Association of Realtors. You can reach Del at Ascent Real Estate at 619-298-6666 or at Del@DelPhillips.com DRE LIC #01267333.
