The Latest: Mar 2017

If you’ve dreamed of popping by Ina Garten’s house in the Hamptons for a fabulous lunch or a dinner party with Jeffery, here’s the next best thing. The entertaining guru has listed their Upper East Side pied à terre for $1.975 million. The cookbook author and Food Network personality and her husband bought the one bedroom, one bath co-op in 2004 and had it renovated by designer Daniel Romualdez (who transformed it from a two bedroom).

From million-dollar condos to $8 beers, the bright lights of the big city don’t come cheap. In fact, living in New York City costs a family with young children $71,237 more per year than life in the surrounding suburbs. That’s according to a joint study by Zillow and Care.com that compared the costs of housing, property taxes, and childcare in major cities to their outlying suburbs.

If you lustfully dream about getting out of the rental game—to have creative control over your space or just to stop “throwing away money” every month—you’ve no doubt given some thought to whether it’s cheaper to rent or to buy where you live. It’s easy enough to search out a couple of listings on Zillow to give yourself a quick answer, but the truth is there are lots of unexpected financial effects to weigh—on both sides.

There’s nothing Goopier than Gwyneth Paltrow’s Tribeca penthouse, and it’s back on the market for the reduced price of $9.995 million. Paltrow and former husband Chris Martin of Coldplay bought the three bedroom, three and a half bath property in 2007. After they consciously uncoupled, the penthouse was first for sale in March 2016 for $14.25 million; a month later, they dropped the price to $12.85 million, and still with no buyers, the listing was dropped—until now.

Maybe you can have it all: spacious living (perfect for a family) in a vibrant, urban neighborhood. This four-bedroom Chicago home has hit the market (but we bet it won’t be available for long).

The reality of owning a home isn’t as simple as it used to be decades ago. Many first-time home buyers are now waiting longer than they ever have, around six years, before shifting from being a renter to being a home owner. (And rates of homeownership are down further than they have been in nearly fifty years.) For many potential home buyers, unsurprisingly, the down payment is their biggest obstacle. Housing prices have gone up while household income has remained relatively stagnant.