Want a Manhattan Apartment? Try These European Countries Instead.

Americans are already heading to Europe in search of affordable homes, but just how much more space can you get in Europe for the price of a modest Manhattan apartment?

A new study by My Dolce Casa, a research blog about living and retiring abroad, uses Realtor.com’s median listing price for a 500-square-foot apartment in Manhattan — around $750,000, or $1,500 per square foot — to compare value against what you can find in 68 regions in five European countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. (Regions with inadequate data were omitted.)

Look first to Italy. Molise, a mountainous region that appeared on The New York Times’s 2020 list of 52 places to visit, took the top spot. For about $750,000, you can buy 8,333 square feet there, which comes to $90 per square foot. Calabria, in southern Italy, wasn’t too far behind at 8,242 square feet, which comes to about $91 per square foot. Homes this size would cost about $12 million at Manhattan prices.

France, Greece and Portugal didn’t crack the top 10, but Spain snagged the third and fourth spots on the list. Castilla-La Mancha, the region south of Madrid (and home to Cervantes’s Don Quixote), took third place, with 7,813 square feet, or $96 per square foot. Extremadura, on Spain’s border with Portugal, placed fourth with 7,426 square feet, or $101 per square foot. Rounding out the top five was the Italian island of Sicily, which had the fifth largest home size at 7,212 square feet, or $104 per square foot.

Not interested in Italy or Spain? You could score a good deal in Thessaly, Greece, where $750,000 snags a 5,859-square-foot home, or $128 per square foot. Less so in Lisbon — once more affordable, but now growing in popularity and cost. It was among the priciest on the list, with $750,000 buying 1,974 square feet, or $380 per square foot.

France didn’t have a region in the top 20, though Burgundy finished 22nd. There, $750,000 buys 4,880 square feet, or about $154 per square foot — still a bargain compared with Manhattan.

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here.