These are America’s priciest towns: report

Becoming a homeowner in these towns is almost as expensive as buying a place in America’s most expensive cities. 

According to new findings from online lending marketplace LendingTree, America’s priciest towns have median home values pushing the seven-figure mark — putting them in the same ballpark as metropolises including San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the median home values are $1.07 million and $772,000 respectively. 

Topping the list for highest median home value for an American town (which LendingTree defines as areas with populations between 10,000 and 50,000) is Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, with a median home value of $998,100, only a hair more affordable than Frisco, which regularly ranks among the nation’s most prohibitively expensive housing market. 

In second place is Jackson, Wyoming, with a median home value of $847,300, followed by Breckenridge, Colorado, where the median home value is $760,000. 

Interestingly, although Vineyard Haven got the gold, it is an outlier in LendingTree’s map of America’s top 10 most expensive towns and the only location in the lineup on the East Coast — all other qualifiers are on the West Coast or at least west of Texas. 

It did, however, align with another trend among the priciest townships in being a “popular vacation spots for affluent individuals who might not make their money locally and can afford to spend significant sums on homes,” as the report put it. “These buyers can snap up a town’s limited housing supply and drive up home prices, making housing difficult to afford for locals who aren’t high-income earners.”

Indeed, this contrast in who lives full-time in certain areas and who is purchasing a second-home there is clear when looking at the areas’ median household incomes, which in the case of Vineyard Haven, Jackson and Breckenridge, are high but not sufficiently high enough to offset the high home values.