June 21, 2017
Dreaming of a beach front property but don't have the funds for it? There's a place just for you and it's at the Jersey Shore.
Realtor.com, a national real estate listings website, recently published its rankings of the most and least affordable beach towns in the nation and a few familiar names appeared on the lists.
Atlantic City was named the No. 1 most affordable spot, partially because of its "shuttered casinos and high local unemployment" and inability to "fully recover from the recession."
AC's unemployment rate was 11.1 percent in December 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 4.7 percent nationally.
Damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 also drove down real estate costs, according to the site, which listed the city's median home price in Atlantic City at $117,500.
Fancy, huh?
"People aren't coming [to Atlantic City] for the gambling; they are coming for the beach," real estate agent Deborah Gegeckas of Boardwalk Realty told Realtor.com. "You've got the boardwalk, amusement parks, shows, a hundred five-star restaurants."
Keansburg, New Jersey ranked No. 2 with a median home price of $125,000, though, Realtor.com notes that its affordability is related to its slow recovery from Sandy's damage.
Beach towns stretching from Florida to Washington made Realtor.com's list of "most affordable." Avalon, Cape May County, landed on the other end of the spectrum, ranking as the nation's ninth most expensive beach town. Its median home price is $1.46 million.
Realtor.com created the lists by analyzing data from beach towns across the country that have between 1,000 and 100,000 residents and at least 30 homes listed for sale. Additionally, the website kept the results to no more than two towns per state and made sure towns with a state were geographically separated by at least 30 miles.
See Realtor.com's full findings here.
