| In Garden City $400,000 will buy a home at the top of the market, says Christina Becker, broker/owner of MBA Real Estate. “You’re going to get a very nice house for $400,000 here,” she says.
“Usually, you’ll get the jetted tub or garden tub, one or two fireplaces, the three-car garage,” she says. With “a lot of our new construction, you could get a brand new house for $300,000 with no finish in the basement,” says Becker. “If you finish the basement, you could get it for $400,000.”
In the farming community, which is populated by an abundance of small family farms, “things aren’t really as expensive as in the bigger cities,” she says. The 2008 median home price is roughly $109,516, according to the Garden City Board of Realtors.
In Kansas home sales declined 14.3 percent in 2008, according to the National Association of Realtors. In Garden City sales are down too — mainly because there aren’t many homes for sale, says Becker. “We don’t have the inventory,” she says. “Last year, we probably had twice as many houses on the market.”
But prices “have remained stable,” she says, adding that the area didn’t go through the wild swings in appreciation and depreciation that some other parts of the country have experienced.
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