Charlotte Named Top Place to Buy Home in What Sector?

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how Charlotte is one of the country’s emerging tech hubs. The tech sector in the Queen City is growing exponentially. Companies are setting up shop all over the metro region. Because of this, Charlotte was recently featured on Redfin and LinkedIn’s ranking of the ‘Best Emerging Tech Hubs for Software Engineers to Buy a Home’ list.

Redfin, an online real estate brokerage firm, teamed with LinkedIn (a professional networking site) to name the country’s top emerging tech sectors. They took it further by naming cities offering the most affordable homes for a burgeoning software engineer to purchase.

The Rankings

Not surprisingly, Charlotte claimed the No. 1 spot on the list! When you’re accustomed to looking at cities like San Francisco, where the cost of living has grown beyond reality, the prices in Charlotte are a breath of fresh air.

According to the Charlotte Business Journal, the Charlotte metro median sales price of a home in July was listed at $269,000. Given the typical software engineer salary, one would need to spend 18.9% of their earnings to buy a home and could expect to find 62.9% of homes for sale affordable. With a median income of $80,000, their monthly housing payment for a median-priced local home would cost about $1,257.

What does the rest of the list look like? As we said before, Charlotte took the top spot on the list of U.S. metros with the strongest job growth and most affordable homes for software engineers. The remainder of the top fives is as follows: Buffalo, New York; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Columbus, Ohio.