Will You Be Surprised At The Size Of Homes In Stearns County?

There’s an old saying that says “perception is reality”, but not in this case. My wife and moved to St. Cloud in 2023 from North Carolina. If you’ve ever moved somewhere different than where you were mainly raised, you learn things about an area that are normal to the folks who grew up there. 

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For us, other than the weather of course, one of the differences we noticed was that it seemed most of the houses were smaller here. There areas in the Carolinas where you have communities of small, older homes that were dubbed “Mill Houses”.  

They were normally built around a textile mill dating back to the early 1900’s. The Mill would lease the home to its employees. Folks were close to work, and paying for the home was easy since the landlord could take the money straight from their paycheck.  

Most of the homes here are a little bigger than those, but some appear to have similar characteristics. 

We often talk when we’re driving around about that we perceive homes to be smaller. So, I thought I’d prove our point and took to a Google search to find out. I was surprised to find out that according to ATTOMDATA.com, homes in this area average around 1,743 square feet.  

That was surprising to us, but there must be complete basements to these homes to help this make sense. I also learned the average age of a home in the Stearns County area is 46 years old.  

This data from ATTOMDATA.com was gathered within the last 30 days and was on April 22nd.  

My search for the state of Minnesota led me to a 2022 article in Visual Capitalist that says the average home size here then was 2,026 square feet. The average home size in North Dakota was 2,158 square feet, South Dakota was 1,915 square feet and Wisconsin was 1,825 square feet.  

And for comparison to our home state of North Carolina, the average house size there was 2,152 square feet. So, technically, my wife and I were right in what we were thinking. It just wasn't a stark a difference as we thought it might be.

Are you surprised at the results of this information? How do these results compare to where you live?