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
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.
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.
It’s the same in Kansas City. I just checked a random house in my city and it’s up almost $100k in 4 years.
3bd, 1bath 976 sqft
:laughs in Australian:
Friend of mine was saving up for a house 5 years ago. Prices have gone up almost 150%
Only 37 more years until he has that down payment.
Yeah that was me too… I FINALLY got to the point where I could realistically start looking, got the pre-approval and everything just after COVID started… People had already starting WFH and moving away from where they worked and investment companies kept buying and now I’m still living in someone else’s garage because prices went through the roof pretty much as I was looking…
Of course once you mention WFH everyone gets defensive and claims this was a trend, but those charts are the same everywhere. Houses in 2018-19 were often less than half of what they cost now…
WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.
This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.
printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash.
Maybe I’m just ignorant, but in a just world that should have never been allowed to happen… I’m sure our politicians had nothingggg to do with that “oversight.” :/
Thanks for the links!
Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.
My janky duct tape together house I bought in 2010, that was built in '58 was 98k. In 12 years I sold it at 280k, with it still technically being out of code. My house was the cheapest sold in the neighborhood, some selling for 320k. It’s insane.
Is this one of the areas where corps are buying up a shitload of real estate?
I believe it’s on earth, yes.
My moon base is not gaining ANY land value…
At only 82% I’m going to say no.
If it’s on Zillow then yes. The trick is to find houses that are not on MLS/Zillow…but realistically there are none. GL! We got ours wnd in one year it went up 40%in a year.
Also in my area that house is a steal and would have offers before it hit Zillow.
My lucky ass bought a house in late 2019. I’m happy I’m making money on it but this doesn’t seem healthy
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.
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
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.
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.
Housing price increases are actively harmful to those who want to upgrade, since it increases the incremental cost of upgrading.
Housing Taxes also increase.
Exactly.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This won’t change as long as property ownership and property renting is unified. There’s just to much of a business incentive from renting, even if it takes decades to make it back. Worst that can happen is that it can sell it back to a market that criminalizes homelessness instead of treating it or its causes.
