Top 5 Cities for Doctors to Buy a Home

Whether it’s your first home, third home, or a new place to practice, buying real-estate is an exciting, and sometimes frustrating, milestone. So many factors go into it, such as your financial standing, your ability to invest, the local tax rates, the needs of the local patient population, and of course, how the new home looks, functions and meets your needs. The one factor that always stays consistent, however, is location.

Methodology and Results

WalletHub, a personal finance website known for in-depth studies, released a new real-estate report offering a list of the best cities to buy a home. The report from WalletHub comes from a study that compared 300 cities in the two categories of “Real-Estate Market” and “Affordability & Economic Environment”. These categories were made up of unique metrics that were graded on a 100-point scale.

For instance, under “Real-Estate Market,” metrics like home value forecast, median home-price appreciation, share of home selling for a gain, and the average number of days until a house is sold were used. In the “Affordability & Economic Environment” category, metrics like housing affordability, maintenance affordability, population growth rate and job growth rate were used.

Once each metric was evaluated, and each city given a score for “Real-Estate Market” and “Affordability & Economic Environment”, the weighted average was taken to come up with an overall score used to rank the cities from best score to worst score. The top 5 best places to live included Frisco, TX, McKinney, TX, Allen, TX, Santa Clara, CA, Durham, NC.

Other Highlights

The most surprising rankings hidden within these overall scores come from the number 3 and 4 cities. Allen, TX is just outside the top 10 when ranked by “real-estate market” coming in at number 11. Then, Santa Clara, CA is ranked nearly at the very bottom of all 300 cities when it comes to “Affordability & Economic” rank, standing in at 247.Outside of a strict 1-300 ranking of all cities involved in the study, Wallethub also found some interesting facts about these cities that could be useful when finding a place to move. For example, the city with the lowest maintenance cost as a percentage of your income is Longmont, CO, which ranks in at number 30, but is not even in the top 100 when measured by “Affordability & Economic Environment.” Santa Clara, number 4 in the Top 5 places to buy a house, has the lowest % of delinquent mortgage holders, whereas places like New York and Springfield percent of delinquent mortgage holders is 83x higher.

Of course, no study can take into consideration human elements like taste, preferred weather, community, and ultimately what it is you like. Yet, buying a house boils down to money and it’s important to consider which location will give you the best value for your dollar.

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