This month, TikTok user @baviddoughy shared a video of a Zillow listing for a single-family house in Beacon, just 55 miles north of New York City.
In the clip, he explained that the original Cape Cod-style home was sold in June 2020 for $260,000.
Recently, after the buyer had renovated the property, it has once again hit the market, only this time the price is much, much higher.
So the TikToker did a virtual tour of the premises, inviting everyone to try and guess the new amount.
"Welcome to a game called 'Guess how much it is now'"
Image credits: baviddoughy
"This video goes out to all the greedy, delusional house flippers and corporations in my area who are buying houses like this and doing too much"
Image credits: baviddoughy
"This is a photo of a house in Beacon, New York about 55 miles north of New York City, and it was taken in 2019"
"Here's a quick look at the other houses in the neighborhood."
Image credits: baviddoughy
"You see, it's here, a typical small Northeastern town, and a year later, the house was sold to someone or something for $260,000 and this is what it looks like now"
Image credits: baviddoughy
"As you can see, whoever or whatever bought it gutted it completely and started over"
"Here are some pictures of the inside. You can see, completely redone, it's giving midlife crisis, recently divorced. And here's the fun part. Shocker."
Image credits: baviddoughy
"It's on the market again after all of these renovations, and I want you to guess how much they put it on the market for. I'll give you two seconds. You're wrong"
Image credits: baviddoughy
"The answer is $1.25 million. Yep. Uh huh. That's what I said"
This example is a vivid illustration of the fact that home prices have gone through the roof in the United States in recent years.
But recent research by Boulder Home Source revealed that New York is among the states showing the lowest percentage of value increase.
The data shows that several states have seen record-high jumps since 2018. Those states include Idaho, where prices rose by an unbelievable 91.9%, Montana, which saw a 79.4% increase, and Georgia with a spike of 76.5%. Rounding out the top five were New Mexico at 76.2% and Tennessee with a 75.8% increase in sale prices.
And in New York, there has been a 39.3% rise in house prices over the past five years, with prices in the state currently sitting at an average of $629,516.
"Only the wealthy are essentially buying homes"
However, new real estate data also revealed that nearly a third of U.S. homebuyers are sidestepping a mortgage and purchasing property via cash-only transactions. (According to the stats, 31% of home sales in NYC were loan free.)
The rise of all-cash buys comes at a time when the average home buyer is increasingly likely to be white, wealthy, and older, and the proportion of first-time buyers is at its lowest in over 40 years.
"Only the wealthy are essentially buying homes," Lawrence Yun, chief economist at National Association of Realtors, told The Washington Post, commenting on the numbers provided by the realty company Redfin. "If this trend was to continue, that means something fundamentally is wrong with society."
And "greedy" house flippers are part of the problem.
After hearing the number, people were flabbergasted
