Buying a house in the city

[BobVosh]

Lets pretend we didn't want to be a hobo in the city. How much would a house be in a medieval type city?

Also is it in cityscape? I couldn't find it.

[Elfin]

Well, everyone knows that no self-respecting adventurer would ever spend more than a few coppers on lodging, but the cost of buildings is listed in Chapter 5 of the DMG.

[Swok]

The most stylish way to live is an item with 1/day Mordenkainen's Mansion.

[BobVosh]

I found how much gold cities have, etc, but not the cost of a house. Pricing on inns beyond the normal as well.

[onthetown]

Ask your DM? Maybe a hovel for 1000, nice bungalow for 5000, two story for 10000, etc... Would depend on location of course, but if it's just a home base for your character it shouldn't matter too much.

[BobVosh]

I did, he said he had no clue. I was trying to find out if any hints existed.

Edit: Chapter 3 has it.

Fairly close costs, btw. 1000 for a regular house, 5000 for a grand house, then it goes to towers/mansions/expensive stuff. Thank you all, though. My slum lord's story begins...

[The Rose Dragon]

There's the Stronghold Builder's Guide (or something). I think you can build a stronghold that is nearly indistinguishable from a house if you work hard enough.

[Amphetryon]

Stronghold Builder's Guide has the prices you're after. Whether they fit within your DM's economic structure is another matter.

[Ormur]

The definite D&D book on something like that would be The Stronghold Builders Guide but it's generally considered to suggest too high prices. Although if you're really cheap/smart you could have a single story wooden house since wooden walls are free for the first floor. Then you only have to pay for the components (rooms) which might be as little as 500 gp for a single sparsely furnished 20x20 ft cottage.

Masonry walls are a lot more expensive at 2500 gp per such area but there are cost reducers. A two story masonry house with 6 such 20x20 feet components (about 216 square metres) would cost 14400 gp before taking in account other factors. If it's split into four apartments each would cost 3600. That's for 50 square metres in a well built house. Building from brick on a larger scale would reduce costs since internal walls would be a larger percentage and could be made of wood, half of which you'd get for free for the first floor. But building higher than two stories also costs more.

The book is meant for adventurers building keeps outside of towns so you could imagine there would be cost reducers for building on a larger scale, having the workforce live nearby and even magical or unusual help. On the other hand real estate prices in larger towns would be higher (the SBG gives modifiers from 0% for small towns to 10% for metropolises).

Going by those rules small simple apartments could be bought for 500-4000 gp with prices rising rapidly with greater size and luxury.

[Mastikator]

Depends on the quality of the house. I mean, you could hire a bunch of cheap workers and raw material.
Considering mercenaries cost 3sp per day, regular laborers should only cost 1 sp per day, or maybe even less. But lets say 1sp per day. And you employ 10 of them to build your house in a reasonable time. That's 1 gp per day.
If you build it from wood only, then the wood itself is probably in the range of 1gp to 5 gp in total. Lets keep in mind that wood is cheap, and that 1 golden coin is a lot of money! Lets be conservative again and say 5 gp.
And lets say that it takes 2 months to build a small house of wood. That's 65 gp.

65 gp for a cheap, wooden house. A shackle probably 30gp or less. Heck, if you have the appropriate craft skill you can probably cheapen it further.

The way I see it, if you can afford magic items. You can also afford a mansion.


(I'm just picking numbers out of the air here, but they seem reasonable to me. I don't know if there is any rules for raw building materials or house building labor, but this is medieval times, labor and materials are cheap, and laborers are dirt poor)

[Lysander]

It's in the srd in "Surroundings, Weather & Environment" under "Wilderness"

{table="head"]Item|Cost
Simple house|1,000 gp
Grand house|5,000 gp
Mansion|100,000 gp
Tower|50,000 gp
Keep|150,000 gp
Castle|500,000 gp
Huge castle|1,000,000 gp
Moat with bridge|50,000 gp
[/table]

[Dr Bwaa]

It's in the srd in "Surroundings, Weather & Environment" under "Wilderness"

Of course it is

[Zexion]

Wait a second: why is it under "Wilderness?"

[jindra34]

BEcause everyone knows adventurers buy houses out in the middle of now where to retire too.

[Zexion]

Actually, when one of the PCs in a campaign I was running decided that he didn't want to play anymore, he bought a track of "land" (by which I mean an empty track of water) in the middle of the ocean about a hundred miles by a hundred miles. Then he cast a whole lot of permanent wall of force on it to act as floors and walls for a massive mansion, and made a magic item that allowed him to suppress the walls of force at will. It took him about six days to rig up the entire system.

[Mastikator]

It's in the srd in "Surroundings, Weather & Environment" under "Wilderness"

{table="head"]Item|Cost
Simple house|1,000 gp
Grand house|5,000 gp
Mansion|100,000 gp
Tower|50,000 gp
Keep|150,000 gp
Castle|500,000 gp
Huge castle|1,000,000 gp
Moat with bridge|50,000 gp
[/table]

Nice find.
*RANT WARNING*
But this is why I hate D&D economics. It makes absolutely zero chance. This either means that the average peasant who lives in a simple house (with his entire family of say 5 in total, has access to 1000gp. That's 20 pound of gold!
Nope, no freaking way, not acceptable, I can't have it, there's no way a simple house is worth 20 pounds of gold! That's more money than a commoner would ever dream of having.
For reference a cow is worth 10 gp, there's no way a simple house can be worth 100 cows, that's a lot of cows!)

[Yuki Akuma]

This is the cost of buying a house.

Being given a house by the local lord in return for farming his land, or building your own house, isn't nearly the same as buying a house.

[Zexion]

Yuki Akuma is correct. It is almost certain that commoners would build their own houses.

[Lord Vukodlak]

Exactly simple house assumes your paying a bunch of masons to build your house or buying it premade. it assumes your buying the land from a local lord all of which are very expensive. I would actually say that for buying a simple house most of the cost is acquiring the land. (or shipping the men and materials out into the wilderness to build a house in the middle of nowhere).

A commoner doesn't own his house, he doesn't own his farm. The local lord does. Owning your own land and house was something only something the most successful people could do. One big reason tens of thousands of people in Europe crossed the ocean in the Colonial era, was land was available.

[Randel]

Or you can go Invader Zim and cast Secure Shelter... watch as it magically extracts material from the surrounding environment and shoves a perfectly nice house wherever you want it.

Or get a bunch of wood and stone and cast Fabricate, should let you make a decent sized structure permanently for much much cheaper than buying it.

[Godskook]

Nice find.
*RANT WARNING*
But this is why I hate D&D economics. It makes absolutely zero chance. This either means that the average peasant who lives in a simple house (with his entire family of say 5 in total, has access to 1000gp. That's 20 pound of gold!
Nope, no freaking way, not acceptable, I can't have it, there's no way a simple house is worth 20 pounds of gold! That's more money than a commoner would ever dream of having.
For reference a cow is worth 10 gp, there's no way a simple house can be worth 100 cows, that's a lot of cows!)

Keep in mind that properties were inherited, and houses maintained over generations.

An untrained worker makes 1sp/day, or probably 30gp a year(estimated). In 30 years(the rate of a standard mortgage of recent years), he'd accumulate 900gp just on his own, assuming he had the wits to live off the land for that period. Add a wife who cooks, 3 sons who contribute to the family estate, a brother who can't make his own way in the world and you've got enough earning power to make that a reality in very short order. And that's *BUYING* a house, which I doubt many commoners do in D&D. More likely, long-term leases, rental agreements or vassals arangments are made.

In any case, that's using the lowest wage you could possibly pay someone for something. Given that the poorest man in D&D can forseeably gather 1000gp in his lifetime, I'd say that the average commoner does it quite readily, since they're trained(3x the pay, minimally), and likely married(for a second income, even if its only a part-time thing, such as mending clothes).

[Kirgoth]

This could be a nice adventure hook. Have them win it gambling or get the deed as loot on adventure then find it is haunted; has monsters in the basement; is one of the local thieves guilds hideouts. etc. Another adventure; once cleared they have a house with sewer access; secret panels; locks and decommissioned small dungeon / temple to evil gods.

Very cool.

As house owners make it required they join the town militia as they are landowners; rather than spending time doing drills and boring stuff they can then be called on by the local authorities to help when things get beyond them. Aka other adventures

Cheers

[Randel]

They get a cheap house in the city but find out it was used as a meth lab. (or whatever other horrible alchemical admixtures crooks with a few ranks in craft alchemy cook up in a magical world)

[Lord Vukodlak]

When a powerful adventure buys a house you don't ask him to join the militia you just hope he's around when the militia is needed.

Anyway
Landowners didn't often join the militia, the militia were made up of peasants and farmers not the guys wealthy enough to actually own the land.

Remember the opportunity for commonfolk to own land didn't occur until after 1492. The main reason people left Europe for America was for the opportunity to own land.
In either case if your wealthy you can buy your way out of militia service. If anything as landowners they'd be called upon by the local baron or King to serve in a military capacity in a time of war. You'd be army not militia

[Ormur]

There were always free peasants that owned their land in medival western Europe and even serfs could be quite successful but that was of course the exception.

As you say in D&D it wouldn't be impossible for a commoner to buy a house outright even though it costs 1000 gp. Even so he'd probably inherit it from his father, rent or build it himself most of time. You must also consider that only the wealthiest people in the modern world buy their houses outright. We usually don't scrape together more than a 100 grand, we take out mortgages or rent. What's more ridiculous is probably the price of gold in D&D but a modern house would still cost the equivalent of 10 pounds of gold or more.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I don't know how it ended up in the "wilderness" section of the srd, but in the DMG, there's an "urban" section just after the wilderness part, and that's where the table above is printed. 1000gp for a house in a town, makes some sense. A subsistence farmer, a.k.a. a commoner, would likely live in a home his father or grandfather built a day's journey from the nearest town.

[Lysander]

1000gp is a huge but not ridiculous amount of money. 1gp = one goat, or 50ft of rope, or half the cost of a backpack. To a D&D commoner one gold is probably the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, maybe even as low as a hundred. So 1,000gp is the equivalent of a few hundred thousand, which is what buying a house in real life costs. Most D&D commoners presumably max out profession and make a few gold a week, so if they take out a loan to buy a house and pay it off over a few decades it's doable. And as people pointed out, a lot of houses are probably not bought outright but merely rented or leased to them as serfs.

[ericgrau]

Even without building the house the commoner could afford it after 20 years or so. That's actually typical for modern home owners. And even without lenders they could pass them down to the next generation, share them in the mean time, etc., etc. But yeah, it's normal for commoners to grow their own food, raise their own animals, build their own homes, sew their own clothes, etc. Every once in a while they buy a pair of shoes when the old pair is ruined and so on, and that's what their income is supposed to represent.

[Emmerask]

It's in the srd in "Surroundings, Weather & Environment" under "Wilderness"

{table="head"]Item|Cost
Simple house|1,000 gp
Grand house|5,000 gp
Mansion|100,000 gp
Tower|50,000 gp
Keep|150,000 gp
Castle|500,000 gp
Huge castle|1,000,000 gp
Moat with bridge|50,000 gp
[/table]

problem is that this is only the price for the house and nothing more I think...
the simple house in the rich district of the city will cost a lot more then the simple house in the tanners district (horrible horrible smell ^^)

[Soonerdj]

The method in our (evil) game seems to be:

1. Find a nice house that suits your purposes
2. Follow the inhabitants around town for a day or two.
3. ??????? (Generally murder/MC/etc.)
4. Receive House.