What is the least expensive (cheapest) city/town/ rural area to
purchase or rent property in Washington State? (yes, even the ver poor
sections)

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 12 Jun 2006 11:16 PDT

Hello there,

I use a very powerful site to obtain benchmark real estate prices for
any state/county/city in the United States. All of the information you
are seeking is here, however it is not available at the level of
granularity you requested.

What you can essentially do is find out the benchmark cost of a
property in any city and compare it to the county average and state
average. You cannot compare individual cities without looking at each
of them.

Would you be able to find what you are looking for with this type of
information? If so, I can post the site and an example as an official
answer.

Thanks,
answerguru-ga

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Clarification of Question by rreneea-ga on 15 Jun 2006 04:27 PDT

Yes. The post would be okay.

Thanks
Renee

Hello Renee,

As requested, here is the information regarding US benchmark real
estate prices that I mentioned earlier.

The following site is a great tool that allows you to "drill down"
through state, county, and city benchmark prices:

http://www.zillow.com/

To provide you with a simple guide of how to use this service, I have
put together a small scenario. As a potential home buyer in Washington
State, I want to know what the benchmark home cost is in Bellevue, WA.

To obtain this information, I first navigate to the Washington State
section of the site, located here:

http://www.zillow.com/local/Washington

Notice at this step that you can find out what the state benchmark is
relative to the rest of the country. Currently, the benchmark for the
state is $283,864. Contrast that to $261,526 for the entire country.
There are also statistics that reflect the historical trends for
appreciation. This is great for figuring out where in the market cycle
this local market is currently.

Moving on, we now want to find the county that our desired city is
located. Since Bellevue is in King County, we select King County from
the list and are taken here:

http://www.zillow.com/local/Washington/King

In addition to the country and state level details, we now also know
that the benchmark for King County is $396,755. The appreciation
figures are also included for the county level.

But of course, we're most interested in Bellevue, so we select it from
the City list and are taken here:

http://www.zillow.com/local/Washington/King/Bellevue

We have now found that the benchmark in Bellevue is a whopping
$515,313. Yes, it does happen to be one of the most desireable
locations in the state. Nevertheless, the process is the same for any
city.

If you don't know the county, you can just provide the city name and
do a search to get to the same endpoint.

There is also a map-driven feature which allows you to pan around on a
map, which has overlaying benchmark prices for the city being
displayed. This is useful if you want to see what the price difference
is for cities adjacent to the one you are currently targeting.

I hope this answer has given you a starting point for getting the
information you were seeking.

Cheers!

answerguru-ga

well, whatever you do, don't move to the San Juan Islands.  We have
the highest rental and real estate prices and the lowest income per
capita . . . yahoo! . . . . and a disappearing middle class . . .

your place would have to be east of the mountains and away from any
large city (Spokane, Yakima) and away from any recreational areas
(lakes, major rivers)

location!  location!  location!


***

You might also want to consider posting a buyer profile on
http://buyerhunt.com/, which is a new reverse MLS service. Sellers
search for buyers. If a seller contacts you directly, you can bypass
or limit the involvement of an agent and hence their commission.