This Doesn't Surprise Me

On my recent trip to the Los Angeles-area, my first-ever, I asked the driver of the shuttle who took us from our hotel to our conference site, how much the homes we were seeing then might cost. They were one-story slab homes that were nice. In my neck of the Cincinnati suburbs, they would have gone for about $80,000.00. His answer, confirmed by another driver later, was that in SoCal, the selling prices would be about $500,000.00. People who move to the Midwest from California and are able to sell their former homes, pocket quite a bit of cash. They buy larger homes with more yard at a fraction of what it would cost them back there. That's why this doesn't surprise me.