My salary didn’t change at all, but homes went up 82%. The money I saved for a down payment and my salary no longer are good enough for this home and many others. This ain’t even a “good” home either. It was a 200k meh average ok home before. Now it’s simply unaffordable
Has the population jumped up for ya guys?
Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.
That’s crazy
Yes the largest generational share of the population is the millennials most of whom are just becoming the age of the average first time homebuyer. Creating a sharp spike in demand for realestate.
Ya but does that happen with every generation then? Having a sharp spike of first time homebuyers.
Most millennials would be buying homes already. The end of the millennial group is coming up on 30 so I wouldn’t expect them to be the driving force for first time buyers when so many are already established
This is everywhere. I’ve been looking for houses for 3 months in NW Ohio. 300k is the new 150k, and all the houses are beat to shit on the inside needing 50k just to make them passable inside because nobody takes care of them.
I wonder what proportion of it is also due to people fleeing 1 million + average house markets during the pandemic work from home wave. Not saying this about you, but it makes me think it’s funny how the common refrain of “Don’t like it? Just move” is often uttered by NIMBYs.
I think a big part of it is we’re on the other side of the peak of all houses going for 100k over asking regardless of condition. A number of houses have that grey vinyl flooring installed in a bunch of rooms that’s as cheap as it is ugly.
grey vinyl flooring
I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.
A former housemate did so much water damage with a portable A/C unit, that not even two months ago I had to rip up the whisper walk, and the original wooden flooring (house was built in the '30s) all the way down to the subfloor. Replacing the whisper walk would have been $3000 for just that room. We managed to find vinyl flooring that matched the rest of the flooring in the house and redid the floor for $1500.
My point is that you can get nice vinyl flooring, and it’s not terribly expensive to replace/ install.
Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.
Yep, that’s on track! My house has almost tripled in price since I bought it 12 years ago. Denver metro. No way I could afford it if I had to buy it today.
So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.
I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.
I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).
Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.
Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.
That’s one thing, but housing has been a low-risk investment for a long, long time. If they bought the house OP posted in 2020 and sold it in 2024 they would have almost doubled their money even without renting it out.
Not that this is “ok” but it’s why “buy whatever you can as soon as you can” is good advice. If you’d put whatever you had into a shitty condo four years ago, and kept saving at the same rate, you’d likely be in good position to trade up soon.
I see a lot of people I know end up in the same position because they’ve been waiting for either the exact right circumstances or for prices to “crash.” All the people i know who started with anything they could afford now have a huge amount of equity in nice homes. The difference is real and primarily about timing more than income or location.
I think you misunderstand. He didn’t have the financial wherewithal to acquire a home of any sort because a down payment was expected even of the shitty condo. He didn’t have the money then he doesn’t have the money now he’s on the same shitty treadmill that the rest of us in the permanent underclass are.
I bought 5 years ago when it was still reasonable. I have a great rate on a great house that has increased by about 50% since I bought it.
I don’t want to, because this is just about the perfect size house for us in a great location, but I can’t really “trade up” as the interest rates are through the roof and everything is more expensive too.
If your circumstances change, you can make a lateral move and invest the net profit in an index fund.
If it makes you feel any better, that house would sell for at least double that price where I live.
At least triple the price in my area. 4x if the schools are good.
I like the utility feed hanging off the front of the house going straight through the roof and blocking them from installing the other fake shutter. I wonder what other construction horrors lurk inside.
You just need to stop watching Netflix and buying avocado toast.
At least that’s what old people say anyway.
Assuming you spend $10 on avocado toast every day, as well as $75 on eating out for every meal, $20 for Starbucks, and ALSO assuming you have $150 worth of monthly subscriptions:
It will take you 25 years to save one million dollars. That’s assuming you never get sick, never lose a job, never need to buy a car or have major repairs, or basically any kind of surprise expense or setback that could wipe out savings.
To be the richest person on earth, you would need to save that money every year for over 6 MILLION YEARS
Not to devalue your point, but if you truly were spending (10 + 3*75 + 20)*30 + 150 per month (so a total of 7800 USD) and you invest it in an index fund getting back 5%, you’ll have your million in 10 years. 8 years at 10% which is the long-term growth rate of DJIA and S&P 500.
You’ll still never be the richest person in the world, but if you truly were burning away that much money, you could make decent dough just from investing it passively. In 30 years you’d have like 15 million, more than enough to retire.
Now the only real problem is that nearly nobody is actually burning that much cash and the “stop eating avocado toast” suggestions are indeed stupid af.
Can confirme. I stopped drinking Starbucks and now I own a 50 acre plot with a 6 bedroom house on it. If only I would have listened to their Facebook comments sooner, I could have afforded that private jet too. Edit: Apparently sarcasm is lost on a few. So for explicitness - /s
With the Star bucks prices you might as well by a house. Damn they are expensive. People spend like $10 on coffee
I honestly just started going to my own local coffee joint. What used to be expensive for something like a cappuccino (like 7 bucks) is now cheaper than starbucks. Plus I help a small business.
Houses in my neighborhood are up 150-200%.
My lucky ass bought a house in late 2019. I’m happy I’m making money on it but this doesn’t seem healthy
You’re right. It’s not healthy to profit so much from corporations greed.
Therefore, it’s only right that you sell me your house for $1
I, too, would like a house for $1 please
Same here. And my stupid ass father in-law spread the rumor that we wanted to sell and we instantly had several offers. But we like it here.
We got in on on our house in early 2016 and the price of real estate in our area increased by 20% while we were in escrow.
Our house has more than doubled in price since then but if we had fallen out of escrow, we would not have been able to buy anything anywhere near our jobs/preferred city (and my partner and I have a combined income north of 150k/year).
Shit is crazy these days
With you there. Didn’t realize how lucky we were, and honestly thought about waiting just one more year on multiple occasions. What’s done is done, all I can do now is not feel guilty I got in, but rather just make the most of it. Pay off as quickly as I can, and vote to help others afford houses too.
Well you are set so luckily it doesn’t affect you much in theory. If it crashes so be it as you probably aren’t in a hurry to move.
You’re only making money if you downsize, move somewhere cheaper, or switch back to renting. If you move and all the other houses have gone up, then you just end up having to sink any gained equity into affording your new place. Rising prices really only help developers, realtors, and REIT’s.
It is theur business to make money off it.
I am not sure how people living in house got convinced that they are now investors though
Exactly.
Housing price increases are actively harmful to those who want to upgrade, since it increases the incremental cost of upgrading.
Housing Taxes also increase.
In California the property tax can only increase a maximum of 2% per year, so at least there’s that. (this law was put in place so that older people don’t get priced out of their house due to house values going up a lot)
Right but you then control the appreciation on a much larger asset. In terms of pure net worth and net present value, trading up is a huge gain even if it doesn’t generate more short term liquidity.
You can also rent out the smaller place and get both cash flow and NPV upgrade.
Work from home is the ultimate culprit.
A. People can migrate and buy in cheaper parts of the country and maintain jobs that would have required them to stay in a certain geographical area in the past.
B. Work from home has gutted the commercial real estate market. Leading investors to move into the home market. You’re going to see a lot of money flow into single family homes to rent over the next ten years.
You’re now competing against established professionals who are later on in the careers and institutional investors.
100% WFH jobs have rapidly dried up. They’re not super common like they were in 2021-2022. Most places either went back to the office or require a hybrid setup (x # of days in office every so often). I won’t deny WFH jobs have definitely contributed to a general rise in home prices in some areas, but I’d need to see data proving it is heavily contributing to a rise all over.
One of the missing pieces that was mentioned by someone else is the purchase of residential properties by businesses being at all time highs.
WFH is efficient and makes sense in many cases. Private equity firms buying homes and holding them to sweat out the market far beyond what a solo landlord could or would, does not.
Oh, I 100% agree that one of the biggest issues is due to corporate mass house purchasing and squatting. But my understanding was that is a problem in some large metros and the surrounding suburbs around those. For example, in San Francisco, much of the issue is due to NIMBY laws preventing high rise condos/apartments in many areas of the metro, which artificially suppresses the supply of new housing.
Really, there isn’t an all encompassing, singular reason that’s driving up the prices everywhere, but a multitude of them. It’s a difficult problem to tackle, but it’s incredibly frustrating that most governments (local, state, and federal) thus far have made barely any effort to address it.
Being able to buy a $200,000 house in the town I live in would change my life so much.
Didn’t think I’d ever see Waleska on Lemmy… but, yeah. This is just the story all over North Georgia right? No one wanted to live in the mountains until all of the sudden you could work from anywhere. Now everyone earning city and suburb pay is happy to live an hour farther out than they were before.
A lot of boomers are going to die in the next ten years or so. That is the biggest age demographic in the u.s. the population is going to shrink by a lot. That’s why there’s a push to make people have more kids, because otherwise workers and consumers have a lot more power.
Private equity is already gobbling up the houses. Boomers are cashing in to finance extravagant retirement. Those who are not, are leaving it to their children who will then sell to private equity groups.
Eventually supply will catch up with demand which will supress rent (if we do something about the price fixing) and it will no longer be a viable investment. They’re probably losing a lot to management costs and capital expenses already.
if we do something about the price fixing
Narrator voice: they didnt
Single-family rental is also a huge thing now.
I work in municipal development, and since 2021, 100% of single-family subdivision developments that have approached the city have been for rental-only neighborhoods.
And they want to put all the homes on a single shared commercial water meter on a single piece of property instead of extending public lines, so they can’t even be converted later without massive infrastructure projects and replatting.
Where I am it’s more profitable to let it sit empty and make a Tax write of than lowering the asking rent.
Not exactly a good business strategy. You can deduct the taxes, insurance, management costs, but you have to amoratize depreciation of the building over 28 years. Not to mention that an empty house is going to start developing problems fairly quickly.
Eventually supply will catch up with demand
Not if NIMBYs have their way. We have a MASSIVE supply problem already, and it’s getting worse.
mine is now worth 130% of its original value
