How much more house does your money get you in Pierce, Thurston counties?

In the past year, our hot housing market has produced some head-turning numbers.

Real estate website Estately reviewed sales data from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017, for the most-populated cities in Western Washington and determined the median sale price for houses based on the number of bedrooms.

The numbers offered these tidbits:

HOMES

▪ Why settle for just one house when you can have four?

You could have bought four, two-bedroom houses in Tacoma or Lakewood for the price of a two-bedroom home in Bellevue. (roughly $181,000 vs. $784,940.)

Apartment rental listings site Zumper also revealed recently that Lakewood was the cheapest city along the Interstate 5 corridor to Seattle for one-bedroom apartments with Bellevue the most expensive for the same-sized units.

▪ Live small in Seattle, or large most anywhere else in the state.

Over the past year, the median price for a one-bedroom house in Seattle was $426,000.

That could have bought you a median-priced, four-plus-bedroom house in Tacoma, Olympia, Lakewood, Puyallup, Kent, Federal Way or Lacey, among other places.

For comparison, Tacoma’s median one-bedroom home price was $136,000.

CONDOS

▪ Get two (or even three) condos for the price of one.

Similar to the above example for homes, you could buy a pair of two-bedroom condominiums in Tacoma for the median price of one in Seattle. In Lacey, you could buy three for the price of one in Seattle, according to Estately’s numbers.

▪ Lakewood had the cheapest median price on two-bedroom condos among the cities surveyed — $122,620 median price.

Bremerton was next lowest at $138,000, followed by Lacey at $141,000. Federal Way and Olympia were nearly tied at $152,000 and $151,000, respectively.

For those still not giving up on the Seattle dream, one-bedroom condos were going for a median price of $379,500 in the time Estately surveyed.

Company CEO Galen Ward has his own take on the results:

“For the price of a one-bedroom condo in Seattle, a person could start their own mini real estate empire in Tacoma or Bremerton.”

This story was originally published August 1, 2017 at 7:00 AM with the headline "How much more house does your money get you in Pierce, Thurston counties?."