The Median Down Payment for a House, by U.S. State | Hacker News Reader

The Median Down Payment for a House, by U.S. State

visualcapitalist.com

12 pointssurprisetalk12 comments

How can three states be tied at such a specific amount? Did they digitize a histogram or something?

Yeah, that's one of those "data smells" that makes me disregard the entire thing since they don't offer a credible (or any) explanation that explains a 3-way tie.

Reproducing here for reference:

    Florida             $98,670  17.0%
    Hawaii              $98,670  17.0%
    Washington, D.C.    $98,670  20.9%

What's more the supposed source has completely different numbers... The most charitable explanation is probably that this was written by an LLM...

It's definitely written by someone who doesn't understand how mortgages work in the US. That "someone" could certainly be an LLM.

> However looking at the percentage of the total value put down as a down payment in those states (10%) indicates homebuyers there tend to have longer repayment plans.

edit: or being more charitable, I'm completely misinterpreting this passage? Down payments don't change the length of a mortgage.

Yes, they link to Bankrate [0] where FL has a median of $66k, HI is at $210k and CA at $141k. And the numbers they present at the lower end seem much too low as well. None of this makes sense.

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/average-down-payment/#wha...

I don't want to be this guy, but can we get this whole thing removed? the lack of integrity here seems anathema to HN

If it turns out it really was written by AI and these errors are as dumb as they look the whole domain should be blocked and the numerous past submissions from there removed.

Why by state? I prefer by city, because when you move, you are personally impacted the most by the city. Average for a state seems too great a range.

It’s amazing how much the Central Valley and such pull down the median in CA. I’d be interested in seeing some kind of map of downpayment vs population density to see how the down payment sizes in populous cities in otherwise sparsely populated states compare.

Pet peeve but why use green (associated with “good”) for the least desirable end of the scale?

way lower than I thought, that’s encouraging

edit: oh wait, I read the addendum about California and I’m back to square one

Yeah the “by state” comparisons are not helpful for many many things, especially as the states get geographically larger so the difference between in a city in the state vs the most remote you can be in the state also changes.

I remember when I was buy my house and my down payment alone was more than many houses list price in the CA Central Valley cost :-/

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