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
$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?
Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.
Awww, that’s adorable.
People still talk like this? Wow. Anyway, it’s not a contest. Both scenarios can be very unfortunate and disappointing
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 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.
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.
That’s cheap as hell compared to California. And I work remote from anywhere I want. Thanks for the tip!
Also here in Europe this is the type of construction we use for a garden shed, not a house.
Even when we do modern timber frame, it’s generally still brick or block at the bottom. How long do these houses last in the US? I imagine a lot of the continent is pretty humid
Timber frames are sheathed in treated plywood and then wrapped in siding. Rain doesn’t reach the wood of a barely-maintained house, exterior humidity won’t do damage in any hurry, and wood is rarely making ground contact. These houses last at least a hundred years given that this style is approaching 100 years. It’s usually storm damage through the roof that causes the rotted wood you’re imagining, not normal wear and tear.
In California at least, houses made with a wooden frame are usually on top of concrete (either a concrete slab under the whole house, or a concrete perimeter under the exterior walls), and the frame is bolted into the concrete along the entire perimeter.
Older homes often aren’t bolted into the concrete, but it’s common to retrofit this to improve earthquake resistance. Without the bolting, the house can move around during an earthquake. The government here has a program (Earthquake Brace and Bolt) where they cover part of the cost of doing this work.
Masonry (houses made of bricks, stone, etc) are much less common here, since they perform much worse in earthquakes.
My parents’ timber house is from the 1780s and is still solid. So, 240 years at least, give or take. I’m aware of plenty of timber houses from the 1600s that are still standing and functional as well.
Is a timber frame house from back then the same as one built post 1950 though? Some Q’s:
- Have materials/practices decreased in quality?
- Has there been a shift from a sense of pride in craft and duty to build well towards cutting corners and saving $?
- Has the density and properties of wood changed as we use smaller trees grown more quickly in monocultures compared to old-growth harvested lumber of pre 1900s?
It’s a good thing you aren’t a building engineer.
When wood is properly sealed up in walls, it lasts a very long time. We don’t really have buildings on an old world timescale, but we do still have colonial wood frame buildings.
Time to eat the rich
No rich person is living in a 325k ranch house.
My man let me introduce you to globalism and people living in refugee camps in South Sudan.
$325K is more money than most of the people in the world for all of history would see in a lifetime.
Wake up to your riches.
Best hurry … Ozempic is destroying the calorie benefit
If the house hasn’t changed, then the value is basically the same.
The price change is more about how rapidly the USD is devaluing.
Between 2020 and 2024 there was about 22% inflation. 1.22x$195,400=$238,388. So there’s still over $110,000 of price inflation to account for past devaluation of the dollar.
there was about 22% inflation
I’m not disagreeing with you, but I just wanted to note that inflation numbers (more specifically, the CPI) is an average across multiple industries - supermarkets, rent/mortgage, furniture, cars, flights, health care, and several more. It’s possible for inflation to affect some industries much more than others and I wouldn’t expect everything to all go up at the same rate.
This is because venture capitalists are buying all the homes to rent
Said it before: no corporation except non-profits focusing on housing should own retail property.
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.
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.
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.
Has the population jumped up for ya guys?
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
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.
Keep in mind that inflation has risen over 30% in just the last 4 years, which explains at least part of the rise in prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if inflation is even higher in certain areas of the country. I’d also not be surprised if Georgia is getting a lot of natural disaster refugees from places like Florida.
The other part i don’t see anyone mentioning is that this was all projected as a result of millennial generation, the largest % of population by generation comparison, came into the age of buying homes. Creating a sharp spike in demand over supply.
A 1200 sqft bungalow near me just sold for 1 million Canadian rubles
And in the past I would ask “Toronto or Vancouver?” But I know that that could be in any city these days.
Not Vancouver. Nothing that size would go less than 2 million until you hit Coquitlam. MAYBE.
Yeah, we are boned all over the nation.
For fun here are some places you can buy for $1 million https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27507233/161-moyle-drive-yellowknife
https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27587880/7077-quinpool-road-halifax-halifax
https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27532186/1132-osler-street-saskatoon-varsity-view
Yeah. I’m pretty much resigned to living in our rental until we get renovicted. No kids, double income, a lot of savings… but the mortgage payments would be way more than it’s worth to have a minor upgrade. Strata payments alone are often more than our rent!
Condo/HOA/Strata fees are a big way people are kept out of owning their own place. Its crazy that almost every place even remotely affordable is part of one.
I get the need for them, to pay for shared building services. Strata fees pay for exercise rooms, pools, grounds maintenance, whatever. I 100% am behind them, as long as the Strata council is responsive to needs and not corrupted, but there’s the rub.
I’d generally be happier with few services and low strata fees tho.
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.
