These Are The 10 Best Places To Buy A House In Maryland For 2019

There’s a the age old question everyone thinks about when they decide to move to a city in Maryland:

Should I buy a place or rent?

Well, we aren’t here today to solve that problem for you exactly. We are just assuming you’ll do the right thing and a buy a place 😉

And while we are happy to tell you the best place to live in Maryland, this analysis is going to tackle the question of the best place to buy a house as an investor. That is we are going to try and determine the up and coming cities in the Old Line State.

To do that we are going to look at places in Maryland that are growing faster than average, but where home prices are below average. In every day terms, the “deals”.

The best deal in Maryland at the moment? That would be Brunswick according to our analysis.

Here’s a look at the top ten places to buy a home in Maryland for 2019:

1. Brunswick (Photos | Homes For Sale)
2. District Heights (Photos | Homes For Sale)
3. New Carrollton (Photos | Homes For Sale)
4. Frederick (Photos | Homes For Sale)
5. College Park (Photos | Homes For Sale)
6. Aberdeen (Photos | Homes For Sale)
7. Glenarden (Homes For Sale)
8. Cheverly (Photos | Homes For Sale)
9. Bowie (Photos | Homes For Sale)
10. La Plata (Photos | Homes For Sale)

The methodology that wen’t into this can be a bit complicated, so we’ll break it down for you in as much detail as we can below.

If you’re not worried about finding a deal on good places to live, check out the most expensive places to live in Maryland and, for those of you on a budget, the cheapest places to live in Maryland.

For more Maryland reading, check out:

• These Are The 10 Best Counties To Live In Maryland
• 10 Best Places To Raise A Family In Maryland
• These Are The 10 Best Places To Retire In Maryland

How do you determine the best places to buy a home in Maryland for 2019?

We were in real estate for almost five years and have been working on this site for another three. Suffice is to say, we’ve put a lot of thought into what goes into finding a good place to buy a home.

So all that thinking has come to this moment where we get to spell out how we’d approach finding an up-and-coming place to live in Maryland. Put differently, the analysis will try to find places in Maryland with undervalued homes relative to pent up demand.

To do that we looked at the most recent American Community Survey Census data for 2013-2017 and compared it to the previous vintage (2012-2016). Specifically, we used the following criteria:

• Y-o-Y Change In Population (People want to live here)
• Y-o-Y Change In Median Home Prices (People are willing to pay for it)
• Home Prices Relative To The State Average (It’s still kinda cheap)

We want places that are growing, have seen home prices increase in recent years, and are still “cheap” for Maryland with the following caveats:

• Home prices had to be within 20% of the state average (Much lower than that and you get to some of the more dangerous places)
• Home prices increased in the last year, and
• Above 5,000 people (Bigger cities have more data points)

So of the 508 cities and towns in Maryland, only 41 places made it through our initial filters to even be considered.

We then ranked each place from 1 to 41 for the criteria mentioned above with 1 being the best for that criteria. We averaged the rankings to create a “best place to buy” index with the place having the lowest index being the best.

Turns out that Brunswick is the best potential gem in the not-so-rough in the Old Line State.

Read on for more on these places.

The area now known as Brunswick was originally home to the Susquehanna Indians. In 1728 the first settlement was built, and the region became known as Eel Town, because the natives would fish for eel in the Potomac River. A grant to the land was then given to John Hawkins by George II of Great Britain on August 10, 1753. The grant had the name “Hawkins Merry-Peep-o-Day”.

District Heights was originally farm land owned by Major Leander P. Williams, purchased as four patented Lord Baltimore tracts known as: “Good Luck,” “Magruder’s Plains Enlarged,” “the Levels,” and “Offutt’s Adventure.” Under grants issued to Lord Baltimore by King Charles I of Great Britain, the tracts belonged to Colonel Ninian Beall, Benjamin Berry, and Alexander Magruder. District Heights evolved from one of the four patents. In 1925 land purchased and formed into District Heights Company by Joseph Tepper, David L. Blanken, Henry Oxenberg, Gilbert Leventhal, Simon Gordon, and Simon Gerber. The land was farmed by Walter and Al Dustin, whose farmhouse stood at 7116 Foster Street. By 1925 streets laid out first three blocks of Halleck Street and Aztec. By 1936, the city had approximately 25 homes built, two businesses, a grocery store and filling station, a pump house and water tower to furnish the water and pressure for the City, a sewage system and a free Model T bus service to 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E.

New Carrollton is built on the former estate of a horse racing figure, Edward L. Mahoney. After Mahoney’s death in 1957, the land was acquired by developer Albert W. Turner, who sought to create a planned suburb. He had received a charter for a City of Carrollton from the Maryland General Assembly four years earlier, on April 11, 1953.

Located where Catoctin Mountain meets the rolling hills of the Piedmont region, the Frederick area became a crossroads even before European explorers and traders arrived. Native American hunters followed the Monocacy River from the Susquehanna River watershed in Pennsylvania to the Potomac River watershed and the lands of the more agrarian and maritime Algonquian peoples, particularly the Lenape of the Delaware valley or the Piscataway or Powhatan of the lower Potomac watershed and Chesapeake Bay. This became known as the Monocacy Trail or even the Great Indian Warpath, with some travelers continuing southward through the “Great Appalachian Valley” to the western Piedmont in North Carolina, or traveling down other watersheds in Virginia toward the Chesapeake Bay, such as those of the Rappahannock, James and York Rivers.|The earliest European settlement was slightly north of Frederick in Monocacy, Maryland. Founded before 1730, when the Indian trail became a wagon road, Monocacy was abandoned before the American Revolutionary War, perhaps due to the river’s periodic flooding or hostilities predating the French and Indian War, or simply Frederick’s better location with easier access to the Potomac River near its confluence with the Monocacy.

College Park was developed beginning in 1889 near the Maryland Agricultural College and the College Station stop of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The suburb was incorporated in 1945 and included the subdivisions of College Park, Lakeland, Berwyn, Oak Spring, Branchville, Daniel’s Park, and Hollywood.

Aberdeen was named after Aberdeen, Scotland, by immigrating Scots.

The city was developed in 1919 when W. R. Smith purchased a group of properties about 10 miles east Washington, D.C., and established a residential community of 15 people. Three decades later, under the banner of the Civic Association, the African-American, middle-class suburban community that had developed from Smith-s venture petitioned the State Legislature for incorporation as the Town of Glenarden. The charter was granted on March 30, 1939, making Glenarden the third predominately black incorporated town in the State of Maryland. W. H. Swann was elected as its first mayor.

Cheverly was begun as a planned suburb in the early 1900s. The Cheverly area was first platted in 1904 for a 93-acre community called Cheverly Gardens. The land was subsequently purchased in 1918 by Robert Marshall, president of the Washington Suburban Realty Company. The Cheverly subdivision platted by Marshall was developed around the 1839 Magruder family homestead known as Mount Hope. Marshall became the first resident of Cheverly by taking up residence in the restored homestead in 1919. In 1923, the first road, now known as Cheverly Avenue, was completed and paved to connect the Pennsylvania Railroad line to Landover Road. 34 developer-built houses were constructed between 1921 and 1925. Most of the early houses were mail-order homes from Sears & Roebuck and the McClure Homes Company. Marshall lost control of the Washington Suburban Realty Company in 1927. Harry Wardman assumed the position until the company-s bankruptcy in 1929 due to the stock market crash.

The city of Bowie owes its existence to the railway. In 1853 Colonel William Duckett Bowie obtained a charter from the Maryland legislature to construct a rail line into Southern Maryland. In 1869 the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Company began the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to Southern Maryland, terminating in Pope’s Creek. The area had already been dotted with small farms and large tobacco plantations in an economy based on agriculture and slavery. In 1870, Ben Plumb, a land speculator and developer, sold building lots around the railroad junction and named the settlement Huntington City. By 1872 the line was completed, together with a “spur” to Washington, D.C. and the entire line through Southern Maryland was completed in 1873.

According to an unconfirmed local story, the town was named by one Colonel Samuel Chapman, whose family owned 6,000 acres of land in Charles County. The Colonel traveled to South America with his son George, who had contracted tuberculosis, in search of a cure. In his travels, the Colonel had apparently encountered the Ro de la Plata, which flows through Argentina and Uruguay, thus naming a portion of his property “La Plata.”

Next 10 Cities

There You Have It – The Best Places To Purchase A House In Maryland for 2019

There’s our analysis of the best places to buy a house in Maryland. And, to be clear, we aren’t necessarily saying these places are the best places to live, just that it looks like they might be in a couple of years based on the data.

In fact, every place in the following table meets our criteria, so even though it may not look super long, remember we started off with all 508 places in the state.

So if we’d could rent or buy in these cities, we’d definitely buy.

For more Maryland reading, check out:

• These Are The 10 Richest Cities In Maryland
• 10 Safest Places In Maryland

Detailed List Of The Best Places To Buy A Home In Maryland