So CAl vs. Olympia (real estate, home, construction)

[Mispolly]

As I've shared in other posts, my family wants to move back to the West Coast. We lived 30+yrs in SD and 3 in Florida. My husband will be running his own construction business. Although we'd like to be close to our family in SoCal, worker's comp and a variety of other factors make a small business very difficult in Cali. Plus, my husband doesn't speak Spanish very well which is a huge obstacle in the construction business in most parts of Cali. I've heard that Oregon home prices aren't much different than California. We don't want to live in track housing. We don't want HOAs. Our current home is 1800 sf and we have a full acre. We don't want to go any smaller on sf or acreage. It is worth about 240k. We would never come close to that in SD. Not to mention that SD is dry and half dead from drought. Too much concrete and not enough nature for us. Suggestions? Are the housing prices in Olympia more affordable than California?

[Sandy Nelson]

Misspolli,

I would venture to say that the housing prices in both Oregon and Washington are more affordable than in California.
Given your prerequisites of an 1800 sq. ft. home on one acre of land, priced around $240K, I can tell you that that's doable in the Olympia area.
It wouldn't hurt for your husband to learn a little bit of Spanish if he's in the construction business. I spend some time on construction sites here in the Olympia area and tend to hear a lot of Spanish, as well as Russian spoken.
Good luck!

Sandy

[allforcats]

Tract housing is everywhere, but there seems to be less tract housing in western WA than in more heavily-developed places.

Your husband can use the terrific Rosetta Stone Spanish program, which will help him become darned close to bilingual.

For real estate prices in and around Olympia, have you looked at Realtor.com in your research? And perhaps The Olympian? They are excellent research sources.