Moving your family to Boston, Massachusetts, is a great idea. There are great schools, lots of parks, and best of all it's safe. However, I would never recommend that you put your home on the Kitchener Waterloo real estate listings and move out here without first doing your research. You need to know how much you can get for your current home, how much a home in Boston would cost, and whether the neighborhoods you're looking at are the cheaper ones or the more expensive ones. I've done a little bit of the research for you here. The statistics are accurate to around February of 2011.

In a lot of places in the United States, you can still get really great deals on houses because the markets never really recovered from the double-whammy of the sub prime mortgage crisis and the recession which hit a few years ago. Boston is not one of those places. If you've previously owned a Toronto condo you'll have some idea of how fast the prices have actually been increasing in Boston. If you haven't, then the statistics will give you an idea. In the last year, the average price per square foot in Boston has gone up almost 17%.

What does that mean? Well, it means the quicker you get down here the less you have to pay for your house! It also means that Boston has a seller's market, so buying a house here won't be like buying London, Ontario houses. You'll probably have to compete with other buyers to get the place you want. The good thing about this is that if the values continue to increase like they have been, you'll be able to make a tidy profit if you decide to sell your home in a few years' time.

I can't tell you how much you might get for your current home, because I don't know whether you own Halton Hills real estate, a condo in Florida, or a ranch in Idaho. You'll have to look that up on your own. What I can tell you is that the average asking price for a home in Boston $831,000. That's more than three quarters of a million dollars. So obviously you might have to downsize your home a bit. Each square foot of house you own now would cost $708 in Boston. You can use that to figure out how much house you can afford.

Of course, prices are not the same in all neighborhoods. At home, Mississauga condominiums are cheaper than downtown Toronto ones, right? It's the same here. The average prices in the more expensive neighborhoods like Back Bay are over 2 million dollars, but there are other neighborhoods that are being improved, like Roxbury or the West End, where you can get a house for $263,000 to $374,000.