12 Real Estate Markets With an Ultra-Reasonable Cost of Living

Fast-rising home prices and pandemic-related stresses had a lot of people considering moving to cheaper environs, and that was before inflation raised its ugly head in earnest earlier this year.

There are still a lot of places across the country where you can beat the national averages for cost of living, and they're dominated by communities in the Midwest and South.

This data comes from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Zillow, Kiplinger, and the C2ER – The Council for Community and Economic Research, which tracked spending data points from 267 urban areas to come up with the after-tax costs for a professional/managerial cost of living. That index pegged 100 as the national average and found a range of 255.0 for Manhattan in the Big Apple to 75.7 for Kalamazoo, Michigan. So, let's start there and look at 12 of these markets.

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