Where do the rich live? Like Willie Sutton said, where the money is. SmartAsset set out to find the places where the most moneybags can be found.
In order to find the places where millionaires are buying homes, we looked at data on two metrics. We looked data on all home purchases made in 2016 and compared them to all home purchases made by households earning at least $999,000. Check out our data and methodology below to see where we got our data and how we put it together.
Key Findings
- Millionaires buy (relatively) more affordable homes – Relative to their incomes, millionaires take on smaller mortgages compared to the average homebuyer. According to our data, the average millionaire homebuyer has a mortgage-to-income ratio of 0.71. That number for the average homebuyer is 2.55.
- California is most popular state for millionaires – California leads the way with five metro areas in our top 10 and seven in our top 15. The Census Bureau shows California has the second-highest median home value of any state in the country. California is also home to many millionaires. Plus, in some California metro areas you need to earn six figures just to afford the average home. This leads to a higher proportion of millionaires buying homes relative to the population.
