Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years
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
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You just need to stop watching Netflix and buying avocado toast.
At least that's what old people say anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not if NIMBYs have their way. We have a MASSIVE supply problem already, and it's getting worse.
Where I am it's more profitable to let it sit empty and make a Tax write of than lowering the asking rent.
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....
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.
At only 82% I'm going to say no.
A house in Austin
2018: $275,000
2022: $725,000
Those are actual numbers from East Austin. I believe the 2024 market rate is $625,000 but it hasn't changed hands again so I can't say for certain.
And conservative Texans keep laughing that californians are moving to Texas because "They hate the blue politics", never guessing that they would bring their blue politics and money with them, driving up land value. Definitely not saying that they're bad, but that it's ironic that they didn't think through the consequences
The people fleeing California for Texas aren't people who love California and its politics.
They're mostly Republicans, and they're making Texas more red AND increasing home prices.
And what part of that consequence is the native Texan's fault? If anything it simply proves their point.
I didn't say fault anywhere. I said it was ironic. It's ironic that they laughed at Californians moving to TX, talked about how much better TX was better than CA, never realizing that the location had nothing to do with the problems, but rather capitalism and population growth. It's ironic that the things they said Texas didn't have are now the things Texas is directly facing.
For it to be ironic, there would have to be some sense of Texans doing it to themselves. People coming in from another state is not a Texan's fault. I don't see the "irony" here.
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.
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 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.
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)
Exactly.
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.
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.
Time to eat the rich
Best hurry ... Ozempic is destroying the caloric benefit
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.
When the stock market doesn't perform as much as a fundamental need
I keep thinking that it would be a great time to sell but then I realize there isn't a lot of other worth while places to go.
Unless you are ready to move to dead mans land
Tbh this is more than mildly infuriating...
That you don't understand the realestate market? Or you didn't know this has been projected for a decade now from millennials getting as old as the avg age of first time home buyers and being the largest % share of the US population creating more demand than available supply?
More like that they probably are too young to have bought a home earlier. All people in their 20s (and I think we make a large percentage of Lemmy users) simply have to cope and buy some overpriced home regardless.
To add to that, we also the only generation who lived thru the only housing bubble giving a hesitation to the concept that realestate has always been the safest investment. They're buying high but are able to control most of not all extrinsic variables that could keep them from selling higher than they purchased. There aren't many ways to invest money that you 100% either control the out come of or can insure what you cant control. The exceptions like community wide property value loss are still specific to the properties location that you decide before purchase. I know there are cases where your research before buying can fuck you but it's still more control than investing in the market where everything about the value of your asset is out of your hands. All you can control is how it's value is managed.
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.
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.
Being able to buy a $200,000 house in the town I live in would change my life so much.
Friend of mine was saving up for a house 5 years ago. Prices have gone up almost 150%
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.
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.
Only 37 more years until he has that down payment.
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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that these companies are investment companies that need stable assets for their billions of dollars portfolios and they actively look to keep buying property as a stable form of appreciating asset. They have so much money that needs to find some way to make more money for their investors.
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.
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.
About everywhere... In Toronto it's now 1 million+. In Vancouver it's now 2 millions+
Right but OP is talking about a house in Waleska, Georgia, which has a population of 921 (as of 2020 census). Not really on the same level as Toronto or Vancouver!
People from big city retire, sell their house now worth a fortune and move out of the city and can afford to pay whatever people want for their house, this inflates the price of housing in rural areas and people born there can't afford to live there anymore.
Hi, Georgian here. Trust me, nobody wants to live in the ass-end of Cherokee County, so far north it's only barely in Metro Atlanta, but not far enough north to have decent mountain scenery or anything. Frankly, I'm appalled at how overpriced it was at $200K four years ago, let alone now.
People move out of cities just to have a bigger lot around their house. Hell over here arable land is getting scarce because people buy any agricultural lot that has a house on it just so they have space, doesn't matter that it's in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and doing the grocery means an hour of traveling, they have the time to take their car and travel but they certainly don't want to exploit the land they just bought!
Keep in mind that 4 years ago was COVID times when everything was shit.
House prices exploded during Covid. Yeah, they dipped for like 2 weeks initially, but then they skyrocketed.
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.
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.
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
Y'all realize this is a bubble, right? I almost feel sorry for these investors, gonna have their ass handed to them in the coming decade.
If Big Macs, houses, gas and college tuition all went up, it's time to realize these are not all in bubbles and instead realize due to inflation your salary has been halved.
Can you explain why you feel that way?
Not really. The system will instead keep finding ways to get people to rent at higher prices or take out low down payment loans with ever larger monthly payments taking a lot more of take home salaries and making it harder than ever to save and invest.
The rental aspect isn't a bubble. Until they start viciously taxing single-family home rental, home prices are going to stay high because they're not being bought as homes but as assets for rent-seeking.
Shout out to ![email protected]
I feel sorry for any one whose bought a house over the last couple years.
Bought a house 5 years ago. Cheaper than renting and equity says I made 100k. It's good.
It's just lame how expensive they are now. BTW, they were to expensive 5 years ago too.
I don't, it's strictly better than renting
Is it though? My understanding is it’s more complicated than “simply better”. You need to account for property tax, home repairs, lack of mobility, housing market, etc.
The main downside is you have to pay closing costs to move. That means you should plan to stay in the home at least a handful of years or else you'd lose money likely. But with the market the way it is, get a house ASAP cause its going up like a roller coaster.
I bought mine 5 years ago and its gone up 50% in value since then.
It's more along the lines of "buying is generally better than renting, but there are about 100 different factors to consider."
My mortgage is significantly less than my last apartment down the road. $2700 vs $2100. Same size living space (1000sqft, 2bed), an extra basement, and I get to live in a marginally more affluent area. That difference in monthly payments more than covers monthly housing maintenance costs. And property tax is already included in that $2100 mortgage, which is how it is usually handled in my state.
And you get equity instead of throwing away your income to a faceless real estate corporation for no gain. Owning a house is 100% better in every way, unless you need to quickly move for some reason.
But even then, it's rare to see a house be on the market for more than a month, MAYBE two before getting sold. You can move out on a couple months notice, instead of having to wait for your annual lease to run out.
But when you do move, you sell your house for ✨ profit ✨ because the housing market only goes UP for some retarded reason.
I've helped three friends and coworkers navigate buying their first house in the past couple years. They are all better off financially for it.
There are advantages I'm not actually culpable for all of the maintenance of my property my actual rent right now is just about on par with anybody who is going to be paying to purchase their house and granted I'm not actually gaining anything as far as property value I also didn't have to come up with a down payment or jump through hoops and try and get the house in the first place and very safe in my position and I'm very capable at this point after having lived here for many years landlord hasn't asked for a new lease in the last couple years so I could actually walk away at any moment... there are benefits but they're few
It depends on the area. Some places are actually gowning that fast in population
Houses in my neighborhood are up 150-200%.
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.
Or not having any but fix your own shit. I like the idea of smaller houses and yards but not if that comes with shared maintenance fees.
The costs for some of these things is silly and since most people don't volunteer to be on those boards they don't even get to see how their fees are spent.
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.
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.
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.
In the lat 80s / early 90s, my SO and I saved up for 7 years to be able to afford the down payment for our first home. Now, that would be more like 20 years, which is too much.
Time to consider moving to Europe or Costa Rica or Mexico City or somewhere, if you're in that boat now.
It's not as bad in Germany, but pretty close. It's a very good time to sell houses. And on top of that they are generally much more expensive than American houses to begin with.
That very much depends on the area and the house itself.
Well you would try to match features 1:1, else it's a foolish comparison
Literally thinking of going back to the old country. Least I could own a compound for that i pay for a caravan in a first world country. If only I liked sun....
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
It’s a good thing you aren’t a building engineer.
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:
Well, the house I'm living in now was built in the 1960s, and is also still very solid.
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.
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.
👍 in Europe earthquakes luckily are less of a concern, so we care more about longevity (you'll find many places where pretty much every house is well over a hundred years old (the oldest one in my village is about 900 years old)) and good isolation (to keep the heat inside in winter and outside in summer so we can heat less / don't have to use air conditioning on our way to net zero)
That's cheap as hell compared to California. And I work remote from anywhere I want. Thanks for the tip!
:laughs in Australian:
Are other homes increasing as much in that area? Or did they build a double garage, remodel the kitchen and install 15 swimming pools?
For my area it's all of them. Could have afforded a home a few years back. If you bought in 2014, 23000 got you a massive home with 4 car garage. Now that how is 600000.
House down the st was 94k in 2015, it sold for 195500 last year.
Bought our cottage for 50k at the peak of the rural movement in 2020 after it had been on the market for months, just sold it while the second property market has completely crashed for 130k after putting 10k in it and cleaning the fuck out of the lot (the place was disgusting, I'm talking 90 industrial garbage bags of crap, mostly beer bottles, a couple tons of wood and concrete and so on)...
Sometimes you're just lucky and people don't want to do what's required to get what their property is worth!
What I'm hearing is that houses have the ability to be a great investment.
Work to get a house and then when you are old and ready to retire you sell and then have a great retirement.
Where tf do you live then? You're just gonna need to buy another home
You downsize to a small apartment for older folks.
Those cost more than a house! The one my friends dad lived in where it was all in the same building and the staff was there just in case you fell was 4k a month.
It depends on where you go. You probably don't need much in terms of space and features.
…until you realize that you still need a place to live after retirement, and any house you’re buying will have the same average increase across the board.
I'm talking much later in life when some of the basic things become a little harder but still doable. You move into an apartment that is for older folks.
mine is now worth 130% of its original value
In my area, it's a 100-150% increase in four years.
It doesn't sound like much until you see numbers.
A $350k house is now $700k for no reason.
A $400k house is now a million.
It's depressing.
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
I'll have to look it up to he sure but I wanna say millenials were the largest population increase for a generation since the boomers. Which would make up the really close to the entire existence of the eealestate market as we know it. Wanna say 1930's the new deal created the foundation of the modern mortgage loan. Either way, the answer is no it does not go up for every generational transition.
It's actually only the second time it has and will go up by the time gen z cycles to home buying in a span longer than 150 years.
I wanna say you were thinking of this in terms of total population growth increasing but it really is more of a combo between birth rate and poulation percent change, except instead of year over year it is 15 year wondow over 15 year window or however long each generational span is.
You want to know why? Start at the bottom and look at the price of land only blocks in the region. More than likely: its the cause. The answer then becomes very simple.
$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.
People still talk like this? Wow. Anyway, it's not a contest. Both scenarios can be very unfortunate and disappointing
Real talk, forget about a down payment. There are a bunch of different ways to get a 0 down mortgage with varying qualifiers so that chances you qualify for one of them is quite decent.
Even if not, there are still a bunch of other ways to get low down payment mortgages for ~3% down or less.
Toss out the old adage of "20% down or bust" and keep any money saved towards it for savings for all the other costs of home/closing
This is terrible advice. Paying anything you can up front saves you several times over in the long run.
Let's talk 500k house, 6%, 30 years, no pmi, no taxes, no extras...
Paying 100k (20%) up front you'll pay: $863,352.76
Paying 50k (10%) up front you'll pay: $971,271.85
Paying 0 up front you'll pay: $1,079,190.95
Paying 20% down (100k) will save you over 200k.
If you intend to live in the house indefinitely, you're so much better off if you put as much into the down payment as you can.
Edit: List formatting
That's great, in theory. In reality, you'll get stuck in a perpetual savings cycle like OP and in many cases never reach the mythical threshold.
200k savings sounds nice, but if you have to spend 5 years saving and housing prices jump 80, 90, 200% in that time that savings lead gets entirely erased.
You can always play around with your interest rate later on, but you can never change what you paid for the house
Also pay on time and as much as you can. Don't fall into the trap of paying to close to or at the minimum. If you do that you will be in loads of dept.
The longer you wait to pay something off the more interest it gains.
Usually, yes, but it's situational.
For example, I bought my house in 2009 during the depths of the Great Recession, with no down payment, and got a screaming deal. If I had decided to wait a few years to save up for a down payment, I would've been 500% screwed.
(That "500%" isn't hyperbole, by the way: that's how much more I would've had to spend to buy my house now instead of back then! Actually, I'd have been even more screwed than that, considering that I'd be paying ever-increasing rent the whole time, too.)
This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.
If you declare you want 100k, but let's say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That's likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you'll end up saving on interest, you'll more than lose out on rent.
Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you'd save.
Good thing what I actually said was
My point was that the advice was terrible. Not that there are other circumstances that could make it useful. Overall, as a general rule you shouldn't want to just hold onto debt for no reason if you have means to pay it down. It's also why I specifically showed 10% as well rather than just the typical 20% downpayment, it furthers my point that
"As much [...] as you can" And not just some 20% or whatever magic number.
While true, I was thinking more about how the person you replying to probably was reacting to the trend of people talking about saving and waiting until they had a reasonable downpayment before they would consider entering the market, and how the market keeps running away from their downpayment savings.
The 'never make a downpayment regardless of context' would be bad advice, but I just presume there is a context in mind about not even having the downpayment to start with and being stuck on the rental treadmill as a result.
Houses only increased a little bit. The rest is inflation making your salary 30% less
A little bit.... Bahaha Hahaha ya ok guy. Just a little bit
The answer is to go somewhere cheaper. If you go far enough out of town the prices will go down.
Plus when the town grows your property value will go up and up.
So basically, somewhere no one wants to live because of distasters, is boring AF, no jobs there.
I once lived in a town of around 1,000 people. It had everything I needed in walking distance - a grocery store, doctors office, pharmacy, post office, restaurant, bar, and mechanic. A beautiful bike trail and river ran through the town. Fiber Optic internet was available, and there was a medium-sized town 15 minutes away with good jobs.
I just checked and the average home price is still around 100k. A 2br apartment rents for $750/mo. These places still exist, but they're called hidden gems for a reason.
Yep, everyone who lives in the less populated areas is miserable and bored constantly. Those poor people, so sad. They should be more like you.
Kind of yes. However if you want home ownership at a reasonable cost that's the way to go. It doesn't need to be in the middle of no where but it doesn't need to be in the upper tier locations.
If it's boring, then so are you. There's plenty to do in the country, just not much that involves "going to crowded places and spending ridiculous amounts of money on things that would be 20x cheaper at a regular store"
No argument on anything else though...
Yes, that's why I have no arguments against the "no jobs" part.
You've never been to a rural area of the country, have you? I traveled to Idaho recently and good fuck was it boring. Hiking is fun for a few days, but then there's 20 degree weather, snow, ice, hail, poor Internet that's basically DSL so you can't play any games or access the Internet. People live within 50 miles of cities for their own sanity
I've lived in them almost exclusively.
Yes this thinking really underestimates the cost of driving and devalues your time.
And as you mentioned, long commutes are uniquely unhealthy.
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.
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.
That's true and worth noting. The difference is much starker when the benchmark is food and fuel, since real estate (and stocks) rose much higher compared to other things.
Thank you for eviscerating him-, oops, I mean providing that additional insight
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.