Mansionmania Tournament: Round 1, Heat 14
 

Mansionmania continues. I'm going to show you the most expensive homes in every state and a few territories, with a few extras thrown in from the largest states to get the tourney up to 64. It'll be a single-elimination tournament.

You will choose among each pair of houses with the following assumptions:

• The purchase price for you is $0.
• All maintenance, utilities, property taxes, and cleaning is included.
• You must live in the home for the rest of your life.
• You can't travel more than 100 miles from home (via google maps drive time) other than 1 two-week vacation each year.
• You get $250,000 per year as a living allowance
• You get an additional living allowance at the cheaper home, which will be valued at 1% of any cost difference annually. I will note this amount in the poll.
• You get the furnishings. If unfurnished, you get an allowance that will give you mid-grade furniture in every room.
• You get any vehicles in the garage. But only the garage - nothing parked outside.

I encourage you to click on the maps in the listings to see the general location and neighborhood.

Also, I will only enter contestants if they have a sufficient number of photos to judge, as determined by me.

Your entries in this heat are:

Indiana:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...7_M32968-59431

Puerto Rico:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...6_M92971-27932

I will pick Indiana even though I would never choose to live in either place. Indiana is still better than Hurricanvilla that is Puerto Rico.

Whew. Decisions, decisions.

Indiana - I really like the house design. It's nice and clean and stylish. You've got nice lake views. On the downside, that's a lot of steps when I get old, and it's probably the smallest house we've seen so far. It's still big, but it's barely mansion status. The pool is so small that it's basically useless, there's not enough land to be an estate, and it's not near anything. For a night on the town I'm going to Fort Wayne. Overall, I'm not wowed other than liking the house style.

Puerto Rico - The house has great curb appeal. It's nice and modern, but it feels kind of sterile, and now that I look, it's even smaller than the Indiana house. The lawn is just a big swath of grass with nothing of interest. You've got access to San Juan, which would be nice, and you don't have winters, but a big drawback is that it appears that English is not widely spoken in Puerto Rico. I'd have to do a lot of learning to live in Puerto Rico and for the most part I'd basically be living in this big white spaceship. That's a big negative.

I'm not wild about Indiana at all, but it pays double the stipend and maybe there's something interesting to do in Kalamazoo. I'll begrudgingly take Indiana, but I'm not thrilled with that decision.

That Indiana house is near perfect. But it is in Indiana. The bad part no less. And no access to a metro area.

The Puerto Rico house is also very nice, and the climate is much more to my taste. I’ll keep my fingers crossed about dodging hurricanes. Since housing up keep is included in the deal, I am assuming it covers rebuilding if I get wiped out.

This is a prime example to me of high-end properties being overpriced. These are both nice houses, but they're only about 50 percent bigger than my own house and I like my location better for a far lower price. I wouldn't trade my house straight up for either one of these.

Due to the 100 mile travel restriction, I view most of these houses as really nice prisons. I’d actually rather have the $250K annual stipend and my freedom to go where I please. You can keep the mansions.

If I had 6 weeks outside the radius, I would be back in the mansion business.

I’m choosing Indiana. I don’t want to rebuild a 30M house.

Going through the IN house feels like a weird fever dream or something, odd place. Puerto Rico feels like a country club more than a home. Love that ocean though.

Indiana because PR is a shit

I was hoping Indiana was another state with Chicago access, oh well. Really like the house, but not thrilled with the split lot and the houses being on top of each other.

Also really like the Puerto Rico house, but not thrilled about the 90% humidity.

In the last round, I thought if Hawaii was a bit warmer or more humid, I might get tired of it.... Puerto Rico house enters the chat.

Gonna have to go Indiana.

The Indiana house is more my style. I’m not crazy about living in that Puerto Rico house which appears to be right next to a parking lot of some kind.

That's all you get for $30 million in Puerto Rico? I figured you could own half the island for that.

Yeah, I don't get that at all. $6,000 per square foot is a price where they're hoping to find a rube. That's Tokyo pricing.

I know a bunch of stock traders who moved to PR because there's no taxes on trading profits. So I'd have about ten friends down there and no taxes on my trading profits. No friends in Indiana and taxes on trading profits. Gotta go PR on this one.

And it isn’t on the water. It is close.