What size property does $1 million buy you around the world?

Remember when a million-dollar home seemed like a major luxury? Depending on where you live in Australia, $1 million can now buy you a lot, or not very much at all. 

And if we’re going off the current median property prices in capital cities like Sydney ($1,027,962) and Melbourne ($809,468), that magic million can quickly feel more like chump change.

But what about other major cities around the globe? How do they compare to our market? Get your tape measure ready and take a look at what a single million can buy you around the world.

Listen to episode five of Domain’s new podcast Somewhere Else : 

The million map

UK finance company OnStride has crunched the numbers with just how far a million can stretch in 20 cities from around the world, and clearly, the million map below shows that size differs from one city to the next. 

For example, in Sydney, you get 81.33 square metres, which interestingly is comparable to what you get in Sweden’s Stockholm at 86.68 square metres. 

Life in Sydney looks rather cramped in comparison to England’s Birmingham (198.68 square metres) and Manchester (235.90 square metres), although things could be far worse, with nearby Hong Kong looking mighty confined at 9.04 square metres.

Side-by-side comparisons

For a more visual comparison, the second graph below shows the relative space in each of the cities surveyed. 

At a glance, it shows that a million dollars in Sydney will actually buy you less space than what you’d get in New York City (99.28 square metres), and just a fraction more than San Francisco (73.29 square metres).

Biggest to smallest

Taking Sydney out of the picture for the moment, when comparing the biggest to the smallest, the difference between what you get for your buck in Glasgow (254.95 square metres) versus Hong Kong (9.04 square metres), seems astronomical. 

It appears that the entirety of a million-dollar home in Hong Kong would fit rather snug into just one of the many bedrooms in a Glasgow abode, all for the same price tag.

However, it goes without saying that the lifestyles in these two cities are vastly different – and the same goes with all of the other cities featured in this study.

While some people are happy to live in smaller spaces and take advantage of the lifestyle that surrounds them, others prefer to take more pride in the home they have, rather than where their home is based.