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Comment by sthatipamala | Hacker News Reader

This is super useful but the results were screwed up for me because of the default house maintenance estimate. For HCOL areas, 2.5% in yearly maintenance is HUGE.

I'm planning on buying a $2M house in the SF Bay Area and didn't realize this tool was allocating $50K a year just for upkeep. Just a point of feedback :)

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Ouch, that's a lot of yearly maintenance. Would you recommend changing the default value or trying to make it dynamic/contextual in some way? Or perhaps just trying to draw the user's attention to it better?

My first inclination would be to base maintenance cost off cost of rebuilding (optionally overridable) -- in effect, you end up with a much lower percent of total value where you're basically paying for an expensive lot, and a much higher percent of total value in depressed markets (e.g. where you can get 100-year-old 7-bedroom for ~= national median home value).

Just draw the user's attention to this and any derived/estimated values. It's impossible to model this correctly without very specific regional data.

Just guessing here, would it make more sense to base yearly maintenance on $/sq ft instead of overall property value? Would better take in to account expensive but modest (lower maintenance cost) versus huge home (higher maintenance cost).

$/sqft glosses over local labor costs, level of finish, landscaping, etc., which is why you see people suggesting 1-2% of value per year, though you're right that it would be an improvement to separate out the value of labor/materials from the value of a the bare lot.

In Texas we need $50k a year for the property taxes on that $2M home.

Yes but looking at Zillow that $2M Bay Area home would go for $250K in Houston TX. In fact, I can't even find homes small enough in Texas to compare some of the houses I see for sale in the Bay...

Do you live in Houston? Yes you can get a home for that in the far flung suburbs, but nowhere near the core city with the cool restaurants and museums Houston is known for. Inside the loop, if you can find houses for ~$300k those are BAD neighborhoods. You need $400k-500k just to leave active active gang violence areas. To be in good neighborhoods you need high 6 figures.

And to your second statement, there are plenty of <1000sqft homes, I'm Austin and in my zipcode they start at $600k.

Much better but not cheap. Houston's median home price is $295 Austin's in $550.

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