How Many Avocado Toasts Does It Take To Buy A Home In Seattle?

SEATTLE, WA - If you're not familiar with the avocado toast-real estate controversy, here's the deal: Australian real estate millionaire Tim Gurner recently advised millennials to stop eating expensive food like avocado toast and instead use the money to save up to buy a home. The premise is that millennials are wasting money on frivolity, like avocado toast, and that's why the generation has a remarkably low home ownership rate.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he told the Australian show 60 Minutes. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”

There's been a fair amount of backlash to Gurner's comments, particularly from millennials. That's because Gurner doesn't take into account that many millennials are paid less and left college with more debt than previous generations, among a variety of other things (recession and housing crisis, anyone?).

Whether you agree with him or not, we decided to put his premise to the test. How many avocado toasts would you have to NOT eat to afford a home in the Seattle area? We took an average of four avocado toasts, which we call our avocado matrix: $11 at Lot No. 3 in Bellevue, $6 at Cherry Street Public House in Seattle, $11 at Meet The Moon in Seattle, and $6.25 at The Fat Hen in Phinney Ridge. The average comes out to $8.56.

So, if you're a millennial or anyone else looking to buy a home, here's how much avocado toast you would have to not eat to afford a local home:

11835 8th Ave NW Seattle, WA | $799,000
Bedrooms: 4
Square feet: 2,590
No. of avocado toasts to afford: 93,457

2726 200th Ave SE Sammamish, WA | $850,000
Bedrooms: 3
Square feet: 2,750
No. of avocado toasts to afford: 99,299

8510 10th Ave S Seattle, WA | $385,000
Bedrooms: 2
Square feet: 690
No. of avocado toasts to afford: 44,976

26241 Military Rd S Kent, WA | $798,000
Bedrooms: 3
Square feet: 1,010
No. of avocado toasts to afford: 93,224

1215 Evergreen Point Road Rd Medina, WA | $13.8 million
Bedrooms: 5
Square feet: 9,010
No. of avocado toasts to afford: 1,612,149

In other words, you can go ahead and eat your avocado toast, because it's probably not a factor in whether you can buy a home in the Seattle area. The median home price in Seattle in April was $660,000, according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. That's more than 77,000 avocado toasts! Even if you wanted to save 20 percent for a down payment on a $660,000 home ($132,000), you would have to not eat over 15,000 avocado toasts.

Image via Pixabay