Your Money: Massachusetts Home and Tax Values examined.

Where is it really the most expensive - and the cheapest - to live in Massachusetts. 

I get a lot of folks visiting my blog for tax information. I get it -  everyone wants to pay less in taxes.  But it's not so simple!  Some towns have very low tax rates, but the homes themselves are so expensive that the actual cost of living is much higher. Brookline, for example, has an average home value in the $900,000s, but the taxes are so low for residents that it is similar to living in Southborough "on average".  So I have attempted (and there are problems with this approach) to reconcile this in this table.  Most of this information comes from the state, but I have calculated some values.  The average value of a single family is taken from the towns assessments totals, and likely includes condos based on some research I have done. The average tax bill also is likely to include condo tax dollars.  The annual housing cost assumes that you are a 20% down buyer and mortgaging 80% of the homes value at around 5% interest rate.  

Is this useful?  Kinda!  If you're from another state, this is a good proxy for where the most expensive places to live are.  But there are some problems.  This doesn't really tell you how much house - or how old - you are getting.  The average house gets younger as you move away from the cities (in general) and go from East to West.  It also doesn't tell you what "average" is.  Is average 1200 sq feet?  2000 sq feet?  I'm fairly certain you get more space as you move out from the cities, especially since $/sq foot drop pretty dramatically, but it's not easy to discern from this chart.  To use Brookline as an example, A quick look at the sales shows that your average home is about 1700 sq feet, but in Southborough it's about 2800 sq feet.  Guess I have a project for next time! 

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