DC Area Makes List of Smartest Places to Buy

• January 26th 2010

by Mark Wellborn

Forbes magazine is fairly famous for its lists. (Don’t you want to know who the World’s Most Powerful People are each year?) The financial publication recently released its ranking of the ten cities that it considers as the best places to buy a home right now. The DC area made the list…barely.

Coming in at #10, the DC-Maryland-Virginia region rounded out a list that was topped by the Boston, Massachusetts area. To determine what cities are smart buys, the magazine calculated the premium to buy — the difference between what people would spend to rent and what they’d pay for a mortgage —and also took into account where economists predict home prices will increase the most over the next five years.

The rest of the list includes:

1. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, Massachusetts
2. Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, N. Carolina/S. Carolina
3. Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Illinois-Indiana-Wisconsin
4. Cincinnati-Middletown, Ohio-Kenyucky
5. Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, Colorado
6. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minnesota-Wisconsin
7. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, Pennsylvania-N.J-Delaware
8. Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Oregon-Washington
9. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California
10. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_area_makes_list_of_smartest_places_to_buy/1717.