[youngButEager]

Easy to buy a condo in Silicon Valley on an Engineer's salary. For as little as $350,000 you can have your own place. If you're a first time buyer you can come in with 10% down; an engineer can easily save up $35,000 not long after they graduate from college.

Here's one: http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1060-S-3rd-...

Once you buy the first property, you hold it for 5 years, sell it and move up to a bigger place, single family home.

No one is expecting a newly-graduated engineer to buy a $1 million dollar home. Who CARES what the big ones cost, these types of headlines are hyping a scene that doesn't exist, "a million dollars! I'll always be a renter!" NO, save up $$ for a year or two and buy that first condo. Then you're on your way as a 'move-up' buyer every 5 years or so -- selling the old place, buying a bigger place.

[gbin]

It works when the market is stable or is going up but this is a highly leveraged investment on a basically illiquid asset.

Always understand that the price can go down ~30% within a year, forbidding you to sell and locking you for years with a stupidly high mortgage.

It happened in relatively "stable" places like Paris. There it was just linked to the real estate market speculation and not linked to a single industry bubble like here in the Bay Area.

[retube]

Indeed. The average/median is a middling price. What's far more important for first time buyers are prices in the lower quartile.

[honkhonkpants]

Unfortunately the price compression is incredible. You can buy a structurally sound piece of crap for a million dollars, and you can buy an unsound piece of crap for $995,000, in a bidding war with ten all-cash-offer parties.

[Hydraulix989]

Indeed, look at the Millennial Tower -- you can't draw any correlations there. I'll never buy property in the Marina, even if I could afford it.