Not a licensed index — the components, each one sourced. Housing from recorded sales, income tax from statute, property tax from county rates.
Pick where you live now. The nested rectangle redraws to the floor area the same money buys there. The striped one is Kansas City; it doesn't move.
the finished space for the same money — or the same house for about 30% of it, with the rest left over.
Read it as floor area per dollar and nothing else: the same money, this much more finished space. It is not a rating of the house or of anywhere it might be.
San Francisco → Kansas City
One bar per component. Left of the line costs less in Kansas City, right of it costs more, and the length is the size of the gap. They are not weighted or added into a single score — they sit side by side so you can see which one is doing the work.
Property tax runs higher here as a rate. That's the honest number, not a pitch.
These five are the San Francisco comparison. Changing the city above redraws the floor area; it does not redraw these.
If you are selling in a more expensive metro, the question that keeps you awake is not what Kansas City costs. It is what the equity you already have turns into here — and whether the difference is big enough to justify uprooting a family for. The rectangles hold the money constant and redraw the floor area, so the answer arrives as a size you can see instead of a percentage you have to take on trust.
Read the drawing carefully, because it is making one claim and only one. What is held constant is the money. What is drawn to scale is area, not width — a rectangle four times as large is four times the finished square footage. Floor area per dollar is the entire comparison. The lot, the age, the condition, the finish level and everything about where a house sits are outside it, and none of those things is small.
The number that matters is not what your current home is worth. It is what you will actually carry to the closing table here: sale price, minus what you still owe, minus the cost of selling. A common planning figure for the last of those is around 7% of the sale price — roughly 6% for combined agent compensation and about 1% for title, escrow and settlement — and since the NAR settlement took effect in August 2024 that compensation is explicitly negotiable and set by no rule. On this end of the move, one thing is genuinely simple: neither Missouri nor Kansas levies a real estate transfer tax.
The metro is not one market, and its counties are a long way apart on price. Median owner-occupied home value in the US Census ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates runs $172,300 in Wyandotte County, Kansas; $230,500 in Jackson County, Missouri; $275,600 in Clay; $282,900 in Leavenworth; $292,400 in Cass; $345,100 in Platte; and $391,200 in Johnson County, Kansas. Federal mortgage-disclosure data on the 2025 purchase loans actually originated across the metro puts the median purchase price at $355,000. So "what your equity buys" has as much to do with which part of the metro you are looking at as with how much equity you bring — the spread inside Kansas City is wider than most people expect before they arrive.
Buying twice the floor area does not double one cost, it lifts three. Property tax is levied on the value of the house, so a larger purchase carries a proportionally larger bill in perpetuity. Homeowner's insurance is priced against replacement cost, which rises with size and finish. Utilities scale with the volume you are heating and cooling — and the metro-wide average of $321.08 a month for electricity, gas, water and sewer is exactly that, an average across all houses, not a figure for the largest one you can afford. Anyone trading up substantially should run the resulting price through the monthly cost tool before falling in love with the square footage.
The component chart is honest about something a relocation pitch usually hides: property tax runs higher here as a rate than in some of the metros people move from, and that is worth understanding structurally. In California, the state constitution caps the base ad valorem rate at 1% and limits how fast an assessment can grow, with the value resetting to market only when a property changes hands — so a long-held California home can carry a tax bill bearing little relation to what it would sell for. Missouri and Kansas work differently: Missouri assesses residential property at 19% of market value and applies the combined levy of every overlapping district, and Kansas assesses at 11.5% of appraised value and applies mills. Across the Kansas City metro counties, taxes actually paid range from about 0.86% to about 1.46% of home value. Move from a capped, long-held assessment into a market-value system and the increase is structural, not a penalty.
Floor area per dollar is a measurement of houses, not a verdict on anywhere. More space is not better if the trade is a longer commute or a house you do not want to heat. And the five components under the multiple are the San Francisco comparison specifically — they do not redraw when you change the origin city, and the caption on the chart says so.
In floor area per dollar, almost certainly, if you are coming from a coastal metro — that is what the two rectangles are showing you. But equity does not travel as a percentage, it travels as a dollar figure, and the dollar figure is your sale price minus your payoff minus the cost of selling. Work that out first. Then set it against what houses here actually transact for: federal mortgage-disclosure data puts the median 2025 purchase price across the Kansas City metro at $355,000. The gap is usually large enough that the interesting question becomes what to do with the difference rather than whether there is one.
That depends heavily on which part of the metro, because the counties are far apart on price. Median owner-occupied home value in the ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates runs from $172,300 in Wyandotte County, Kansas and $230,500 in Jackson County, Missouri up to $345,100 in Platte County and $391,200 in Johnson County, Kansas. The same equity is a different house in each of them. Rather than reasoning from a metro average, take your equity figure, pick the two or three areas your commute and your priorities actually allow, and look at what is selling there.
Three numbers, in order. What the house sells for — not the automated estimate, which is a guess with a confidence interval it does not show you. Minus the payoff on your mortgage, which is the balance plus interest to the closing date, and is not the figure on your last statement. Minus the cost of selling: agent compensation, which has been explicitly negotiable since the NAR settlement took effect in August 2024, plus title, escrow and settlement charges, commonly planned at around 7% of the price all in. What remains is what you can actually bring here.
As a rate, yes, and it is a structural difference rather than a surprise. The California constitution caps the base ad valorem rate at 1% and limits how fast an assessment can rise, resetting to market value only on a change of ownership, so a long-held home there is often taxed on a value far below what it would fetch. Missouri assesses residential property at 19% of market value and applies each district's combined levy; Kansas assesses at 11.5% and applies mills. Taxes actually paid across the Kansas City metro counties run from about 0.86% to about 1.46% of home value (US Census ACS 2020-2024). Budget for that before you decide how much house to buy.
Yes, in three places at once, and this is where a lot of people moving from expensive metros get caught. Property tax is charged on the value of the house, so buying twice as much house carries roughly twice the annual bill forever. Insurance is priced on replacement cost, which climbs with size and finish. Utilities scale with the volume you heat and cool; the metro-wide average of $321.08 a month for electricity, gas, water and sewer is an average across all houses, not a figure for a large one. Put your intended price through the monthly cost tool before you commit to the extra space.
Plenty of people arriving from higher-cost metros can, and the monthly cost tool has a cash option that shows what it does: it takes the principal and interest bar to zero and leaves the other three standing. That is the honest picture. A paid-off house still owes property tax every year, still needs insuring, and still runs a utility bill — and on a larger house the first two are larger too. Whether to pay cash or keep the mortgage and invest the difference is a question for your own financial adviser, not for a calculator on a real estate site.
No. Finished floor area is the only thing being compared, and the tool says so directly under the drawing. Land is not in it, which matters because lot sizes differ enormously between metros and land is often the majority of the value in the expensive one you are leaving. Age is not in it either, and neither is condition, finish level, layout or anything at all about where a house sits. Read the rectangles as one measurement, then do the rest of the work on actual listings.
Because those five components are the San Francisco comparison and are not recomputed per city — the caption under the chart states this rather than letting you assume otherwise. Changing the origin city redraws the floor-area rectangles and the multiple above them; it does not redraw the bars. Read the bars as an illustration of which categories tend to move in which direction on a move like this, and take the property tax bar seriously in particular, since it is the one that points against the direction of the pitch.
Sources on this page — home values by county: US Census ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates, table B25077 · Median purchase price: CFPB/FFIEC Home Mortgage Disclosure Act loan-level data, 2025, Kansas City MO-KS MSA · Effective property tax rates: US Census ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates, tables B25103 and B25077 · Assessment mechanics: RSMo 137.115 (Missouri, 19%), Kansas Constitution Article 11 Section 1 (Kansas, 11.5%), California Constitution Article XIII A · Utilities: EIA 2024, KC Water FY2026, WaterOne and Johnson County Wastewater 2026 · Selling costs at about 7% are a planning convention, not a rate; agent compensation has been explicitly negotiable since the NAR settlement took effect 17 Aug 2024. Neither Missouri nor Kansas levies a real estate transfer tax. The square footages drawn in the tool above are illustrative anchors and are not presented here as measured figures.