How I Made $5000 in the Stock Market

You Can Afford a Home. You Just Have to Know Where to Look.

Nov 09, 2025 02:00:00 -0500 by Shaina Mishkin | #Real Estate

The skyline over Toledo, Ohio. (Nick Klein / Dreamstime)

Key Points

Like many metropolitan areas, Toledo, Ohio, has seen home prices climb over the past five years. But, unlike the others, the Glass City’s prices have remained relatively in-reach for prospective buyers.

Becoming a homeowner in the metro “is still very achievable,” says Emily Bailey, a real estate agent and the president of the Northwest Ohio Realtors. Part of that is pricing: despite recent years’ price gains the area’s median sale price is still just above $200,000, she notes, about half the national average.

The Ohio metro is one of the few places in the nation where home prices are relatively affordable in relation to the area’s median salary, according to a Harvard Joint Center of Housing Studies analysis of 100 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

The center’s analysts calculated price-to-income multiples for 100 of the largest metropolitan areas using 2024 median single-family home sale price data from the National Association of Realtors and median household income projections from Moody’s Analytics.

Toledo has a price-to-income multiple of 2.8, the lowest of all the metro areas evaluated and significantly below the average multiple of five. An easy way to think about it is as the number of years of salary an area’s median household would need to save to buy a home in all-cash.

The measure is a helpful way to easily size up housing costs, but it isn’t perfectly applicable to the real world. The multiple doesn’t account for the impact of fluctuating mortgage rates. It also shouldn’t be taken literally as the number of years it takes to buy a home: Most actual buyers, of course, don’t devote their entire yearly salary to their homebuying budget, and are more likely to save for a down payment and take out a mortgage than pay in cash.

Places like Toledo are standouts at a time when the housing market nationally has been stymied by a combination of higher prices and mortgage rates. “Interest rates went up and home prices didn’t come down nationwide,” says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center of Housing Studies. “We’re kind of left within this period of historically high home prices, [without] historically low interest rates to help confront that.”

They’re also shrinking in number. Before the pandemic supercharged home price gains, it took four years of salary on average to buy a home, with homes in 22 metropolitan areas carrying a multiple of roughly three years or less. In 2024, the same was true in only five metropolitan areas. In addition to Toledo, these include Akron, Ohio; McAllen, Tex.; Pittsburgh, Penn.; and Syracuse, N.Y.

The median first-time home buyer in the year ended June 2025 was 40 years old, a new high. “There’s just fewer younger first-time buyers that are willing to make the leap into homeownership at this point,” says Eric Finnigan, the Vice President of Demographics Research at John Burns Research & Consulting. “Even ignoring the down payment they would have to come up with, it’s a big jump” in monthly costs, he says.

The “least disruptive” solution for stretched home affordability is income growth, says Harvard’s McCue. “The rate of increase in prices is slowed and that’s allowing income growth to catch up,” he says.

Geographic trends could change as the housing market rebalances. Home price gains have recently been strongest “in the supply-constrained Northeast and the more affordable Midwest,” National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement Thursday.

Price declines, meanwhile, have been most common in southern states, he noted. “Given the region’s faster job growth, these price drops should be viewed as temporary and as a second-chance opportunity for those previously priced out of the market.”

Write to Shaina Mishkin at shaina.mishkin@dowjones.com