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From Maryland to Virginia, where you can find million-dollar starter homes

Rising home prices and higher mortgage rates continue to price many buyers out of the housing market, but there are neighborhoods where first-time buyers, even with good incomes, are unlikely to even afford a starter home.

There are five suburbs in the D.C. region where a starter home costs at least $1 million.

Zillow defines “starter home” as one that is priced in the lowest third of home values in any given area, so the more expensive the neighborhood, the higher the price of a starter home.

There are four areas in Maryland where a starter home costs at least $1 million: Chevy Chase, Glen Echo, Potomac and Gibson Island. There is one million-dollar starter home suburb in Northern Virginia: Great Falls.

Zillow did not include the District in its list, nor the average price for million-dollar starter homes in each suburb.

In the D.C. metro, the typical price of a starter home in general is $358,500.

Nationwide, there are 233 million-dollar starter home suburbs — triple what it was just five years ago.

California tops the list of states with million-dollar starter homes at 113 suburbs, followed by New York at 32 and New Jersey at 20.

Half of all U.S. states have at least one such city.

By metro, the top million-dollar starter home suburbs are in the New York City area, the San Francisco metro, Los Angeles, San Jose, Miami and Seattle.

America 250: How people ordered their ready-to-assemble homes from a catalog

For decades, Americans could browse a catalog, choose a home and order it by mail. Sears, Roebuck and Company was a prominent manufacturer of mail-order homes. The company sold about 70,000 to 75,000 homes from 1908 to 1940, according to the Sears Archives. Its catalogs offered more than 400 different house styles and the listed prices could range from around $200 to $6,000. Customers even had the option of designing their own home and submitting the blueprint to Sears.
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