It takes $350K per year to afford a house in Orange County

The real estate market in Orange County is expensive. Very expensive.

The median home price in the county has been well over a million dollars for several years. O.C. Register columnist Jonathan Lasner crunched the numbers and said you have to make well over six figures to buy one of those houses.

“When mortgage rates are around 7%, you get into a high payment, which obviously requires lots of money to qualify for that,” he said. “It requires $350,000 income to buy the county's $1.37 million median-priced home. That would also – to get those payments, that means you'd have to put down $275,000 down payment.”

Lansner says there are a host of factors contributing to those staggering prices, including a shortage of open real estate where new homes can be built, as well as relatively high incomes in the area.

“The median household salary is $105,000. That doesn't obviously buy a median-price home, but that tells you where the base is,” he said. “So there are a lot of people who are making good money, and there are plenty of those jobs and a small segment of the population to keep these prices high.”

Lansner notes that because of Orange County's expensive market, home sales have been extremely slow so far this year, and he's not optimistic that much will change anytime soon.

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“I think there's a lot of effort to at least attempt to fix this in a modest standpoint, but I don't think it's gonna be fixed for multiple reasons,” he said. One, there aren't a lot of places to put homes right now. Two, land is so expensive that the builders tend to focus on the higher end of the market.”

He said that even if developers went on a building spree, it wouldn’t change anything in the short term.

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