How to Break Into the Housing Market, Even Now
It was about as far as you could get from Jeff Langholz’s and Karen Lowell’s idea of a dream house and still have four walls and a roof: a ramshackle double-wide on a weed-infested lot in rural Monterey County. A trailer for $169,000. Was this a joke? Had real estate grown so cartoonish that two Ph.D.-packing graduates of Cornell were scrambling to move into a green-shag-carpeted mobile home in a community nicknamed “Prunetucky”?
Well, yes, it had. It was 1999, the beginning of the real estate boom, and with just $7,000 from Karen’s parents for a down payment and prices on the coast edging toward $500,000, the couple realized the Prunedale property was their only way in. So they bought. Three years later, with two kids in tow, they traded up to an 1,100-square foot house on 2 acres on a sunny hillside a mile away.
It was a critical step up. With a white-hot market on their side, they were well on their way to realizing the kind of wealth that real estate brings to those lucky enough to get a piece of it.