Thursday, June 5, 2014

Local Billionaires Could Buy Up Every House In Most U.S. Cities, Towns

In an interesting demonstration of the fortunes that have been created here in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle's Redfin has cranked the numbers, and figured out that local billionaires probably could buy up every home in a large number of cities and towns around the country with their fortunes. Are you Amazon's Jeff Bezos? Go ahead, buy all of Napa, California and it 57,023 homes for your $29.5 billion in net worth; how about Nike's Phil Knight? You can own all 37,838 homes in Falls Church, Virginia, for just $18 billion. How about Bill Gates? Boston only would cost $76.6 billion for its 114,212 homes. How about Microsoft's Steve Ballmer? He can buy all of Littleton, Colorado, and its 64,516 homes, for $20 billion. Redfin also compared the net worth of a number of other non-local billionaires against the net value of their homes. However, one city none of the local billionaires could buy is Seattle: you'd have to be the Walton Family, and pay $111.5 billion for the 241,450 homes here.