Buying ‘Starter Home' in San Diego? You Need to Make $187,000 a Year: Realtor.com

According to a recent report from Realtor.com, you'll need to cough up $4,666 a month for a mortgage for a starter home in San Diego.

The report, which breaks down starter-home prices and the required annual household incomes for 20 cities around the United States, shows that San Diegans would need to make $186,645 per year to afford one locally, priced in at $669,000.

Those figures are calculated using a 10% down payment with a 6.25% mortgage rate (good luck with that: NBC News reported Thursday that the 30-year home mortgage rate just hit 6.7%!) and a 1.72% tax rate.

Staggering, right? It's even worse up north: LA folks need to shell out 700 large for a starter, and they'd need to make $195,294 to pay the $4,882 nut. The only place pricier than that in the report— surprise! — is San Fran, where a similar home will set you back $860,000 — if you can find one. Those Bay Area residents lucky enough to find one will need to make $239,933 per annum to shell out their monthly $5,998.

Those numbers almost — almost — make one wish they were living in the Gateway to the West, where the denizens of St. Louis can move into a starter for the low, low price of $150,000. While there, their households will need to rake in $41,849 in order to be able to hit the bank with $1,046 every 30 days. That's a little over 20 bucks an hour for a SINGLE breadwinner.

How about the Big Apple? A mortgage of $3,453 will, 30 years later, pay off a $495,000 starter home — so what is that? a 300-square foot studio? — and will require an annual income of $138,101.

Alan Gin, an associate professor of economics at the University of San Diego, told NBC 7 that even if there are two earners in a household, many of them simply won't be able to afford a starter home in America's Finest City.

"Unfortunately, just to get a starter home, most people are priced out of that market, most households are priced out of that market," Gin said. "You either have to make a big amount of income or you will have to have come from another place where the housing market is also pretty high, where you can sell your home and make a good amount there and that gives you enough then to put a bigger down payment then on the house."

Even if you make that kind of cheese, you may be wondering if now is the time to buy. The latest Case-Shiller Index figures, which are for July, came out this week, and show a dip in local home prices of 2.5%, month-to-month. However, home prices in the county have jumped 16.6% year-over-year, so brick-and-mortar is still a much more solid investment than, say, the Dow, which cratered about 6.7% in roughly the same period.

Gin said the dip "could signal the start of a trend."

"We're used to prices going up in San Diego in terms of housing prices, so a drop, then — of any size — might be considered a significant move," Gin said.

So what impact could falling prices have on people who are looking to get into the housing market in San Diego?

"It would definitely help in terms of people then getting into the housing market," Gin said. "A lot of people have been priced out because prices have gone up so much, and any sort of decrease then could help people in terms of getting into the market. The problem is that that has been offset by an increase in interest rates, which makes mortgage payments even higher."