With HH income of $200K, you can get a 30 year fixed at $600K – $ 700K using traditional lending standards (3-3.5x gross income).

The runup in prices was possible due to low lending, but maybe it got started because of the many higher paying jobs. Say we are selling 40K homes/year, and half those people are making enough money to buy at 3.5x income, and then the other half must stretch to 7 or 10 x income just to keep up. So the combination of $120K jobs and loose lending caused the higher prices.

I don’t know of any other way to explain why Cheyenne Wyoming is not in a housing bubble. Las Vegas and Phoenix are in a housing bubble, but Cheyenne Wyoming is not. What explains it, if not the difference in wages?