NOYB wrote:

There is one home (out of 31 for sale in my neighborhood) under 7
figures.
It's 1500 sq ft., was built in 1960, and is priced at $959k.


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31 homes for sale in your "neighborhood"? Either its a big
neighborhood, or that full size Bush billboard in your front yard has
everybody p-o'd. :-) (kidding)

Illustrating my point, exactly. Lets say you paid $500,000 for you pad,
and it would now sell for
$1.3mm. If you sold your house for that price and needed to move to
another just as nice, it would cost you $1.3mm to buy an equivalent
home in the same area.

Now, if you had purchased two or more homes when they were selling for
$500,000 apiece- each of them beyond the one you consume each month by
living in it would actually be an "investment." If you sold two
investment homes corresponding to the above example you would have a
gross capital gain of $1.6mm, not a bad payoff for simply sitting
around cashing rent checks for a few years.