10 beach towns for real estate bargains

Often, buying a home in a beach town is an expensive proposition, but in some spots there are bargains to be found.

Real estate research firm RealtyTrac identified beach towns with fewer than 50,000 residents that had a high quality of life and then investigated which of those had the best bargains. The study, released Friday, measured the median price of homes in towns relative to prices in other beach towns, as well as the home prices that weren’t too close to their pre-housing bubble peak. For quality of life, it looked at good weather and air quality, and a low density of registered criminal offenders. 

“It’s a surprising list — these are places people have not heard of as much,” says Daren Blomquist, the senior vice president of RealtyTrac. Indeed, often they are beach towns that are close to a but not the name-brand beach town, which is why they represent a deal, he adds. (Of course, that also means some of them are sleepier than their bigger-named counterpart: For example, Bethany Beach, Delaware, which is roughly half an hour from Ocean City, Maryland, makes the top 10, but it doesn’t have nearly as much in the way of restaurants and entertainment as Ocean City does.

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