Realtors, experts weigh in on Pittsburgh housing market for median income earners

Editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series on real estate market trends in Western Pennsylvania.

Ashlea Lee was tired of hunting for pet-friendly rental apartments for Reese, her 5-year-old golden retriever.

The Westmoreland County native and Greensburg Central Catholic alumna knew what she wanted: a modest ranch, preferably with a fenced-in yard — and one in a safe neighborhood.

“You can really get carried away — ‘Oh, I want this in the house, I want that in the house,’” Lee said with a laugh. “Fifteen years ago, maybe I could’ve afforded a different home. But, with this economy, you’ve got to be smart.”

At 40, just two years above the ever-increasing median age for first-time homebuyers in the U.S., Lee made it official earlier this month, unpacking moving boxes at her new home in Hempfield.

“When I started looking, I wanted to stay under $250,000,” she said. “I know that sounds like a lot, but once you get into the market, it’s not.”

Realtors say there is no “typical” homebuyer in the Pittsburgh area. But statisticians say they’re part of a growing club. In July, 65% of residences in the U.S. were owned and not rented, the Census Bureau reported.

So where does a family with the Pittsburgh area’s median household income — $76,615 in Allegheny County, $71,081 in Westmoreland — buy a home these days?

“They don’t.”

That’s Matt Murphy, a mortgage loan officer for Howard Hanna. The Penn State University alumnus, who grew up in Penn Hills, estimates about 25% of a person’s monthly salary should go to housing.

“In our eyes, you could afford a $2,500-a-month mortgage” with the median household income, said Murphy, 51, of Oakmont.

But there are numbers on paper and then there’s reality, Murphy said.

A person making a $75,000 annual salary in 2025 will take home $2,351.86 each month after taxes, according to ADP, the payroll and human resources company.

The monthly mortgage on a $250,000 home — which is the region’s ballpark average — totals around $2,000, the real estate website Zillow says.

And that hypothetical mortgage is calculated with low monthly debts and a $20,000 down payment on the home.

“Pittsburgh is still relatively economical,” Howard Hanna real estate agent Laura Dinkin, 51, of Squirrel Hill, told TribLive. “But home prices have gotten out of control. And there’s a lack of inventory — and that just drives the prices further up.”

Most affordable market?

Pittsburgh took the crown — well, technically, held onto it — this year.

For the fifth year in a row, a housing study again christened the Steel City as “the most affordable market” in America. Demographers at Chapman University and the Canadian group Frontier Centre for Public Policy painted Pennsylvania’s second-largest city as an outlier in a modern-day gold rush for real estate.

Other outlets have lauded Pittsburgh’s affordability — from the New York Post to Realtor.com and the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors. Just this summer, Newsweek, among others, pointed out Pittsburgh is one of the few cities in the U.S. where paying a monthly mortgage on a “starter home” is cheaper than paying rent to a landlord.

This year’s study from Chapman University, though, felt ripe with dread. Skyrocketing housing costs in certain markets, it said, offered “grave implications on the prospects for upward mobility.”

When the study’s authors addressed housing affordability, they used phrases like “deterioration” and “crisis.” “Restrictive housing policies” were “regressive,” they said; “young people, minorities and immigrants” were dubbed “victims.”

Those trends do play out in Pittsburgh.

The sale price for a particular custom-built, 4-bedroom/4-bath house on the market in Upper St. Clair, a posh suburb in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, comes in just short of $1 million. The home, which boasts nearly 3,700 square feet, offers gas fireplaces, a “spa-like wet room” and an estimated monthly mortgage that tops $6,200.

The Upper St. Clair house was built a decade ago. The median-age Pittsburgh home, by comparison, is about 68 years old in 2025, the second-oldest market average in the U.S. and more than double the national average, according to a recent Redfin report.

New construction comes with a steep bill.

A home built this year in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood invites an $899,000 price tag; one built in Westmoreland County is cheaper — but not cheap. The sellers of a circa-2025, 3-bedroom/3-bath home in Salem are seeking $589,000.

What money buys

But, real estate agents stress, buyers can find affordable homes in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

About $200,000 will get you a 3-bedroom/2-bath in Pittsburgh’s Beechview neighborhood — complete with a new roof, a finished basement and a detached garage.

A 3-bedroom/2-bath on an Oakmont cul-de-sac runs $179,900. A 3-bedroom/1-bath house on a half-acre in Hempfield is pegged at $199,900. Fixer-uppers and homes seeking some DIY work flesh out the housing stock.

More than 3,200 houses were listed for sale in the Pittsburgh area this week on Realtor.com. About half of them were selling for $250,000 or less.

One of the problems in Pittsburgh is stagnancy — there’s little new home construction here, according to Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the realty company Redfin.

In Austin, Texas, for example, home-construction contractors have been aggressive, Fairweather said. Permits to build nearly 3,000 housing units were issued in July alone, the U.S. Census reported. In Phoenix, where the Sun Belt market is hot, 3,656 permits were issued that month.

In the Pittsburgh market, the number is just 432.

But Fairweather said even a lack of new construction to draw in new residents hasn’t seemed to deflate Southwestern Pennsylvania’s real estate market.

“Prices keep going up in Pittsburgh — and that’s an indication that there is a demand to buy,” Fairweather said. “And a middle-class homebuyer in Pittsburgh will have an easier time finding and buying a home than a middle-class homebuyer in California — or in Boston.”

Dinkin, the Howard Hanna real estate agent, says prices aren’t the entire picture. What’s also important is evaluating how new economic realities are putting financial pressure on today’s workforce.

“With me and my husband, it was ‘Save! Save! Pay your bills!’” Dinkin said. “Now you guys can’t do that. You can’t save anything.”

That makes Ashlea Lee a little bit of an exception to the rule. Income from jumping to a higher-paying job after the pandemic gave her the financial chutzpah to nudge her way into the housing market.

For now, though, she’s relishing all of it.

“I wanted a manageable amount of house — we don’t need anything super-crazy,” Lee said. “But I already have the landscaping scheduled. And I want to finish the basement.”