As a millennial that was somehow able to afford a house this bubble needs to fucking pop.
I’ll be locked into this house until I die and all of my friends and family will have to keep moving further away as they get priced out of their apartments each year. Before this I had moved 8 times in 6 years.
I bought mine during the housing crash in 2008. Shit was ballin. No way I could afford a house now.
Also a millennial. Wife and I got our condo right before everything shot up, got a nice 3.25% APR. Great mortgage honestly. But we’ve been trying to sell our condo for a YEAR now and I honestly think it’s the bubble holding back a sale. The condo is just too expensive for what it is (and the horrific rise of small community HOA fees has gotten way out of hand…). We’re priced right compared to others on the market, but selling condos is just stupid hard right now.
Sure I’d love it if we could sell now and get some nice profits from the sale, but I absolutely agree this bubble needs to pop!
Complains that bubble needs to pop. Is trying to sell a condo but has it priced too high to attract any buyers. Doesn’t lower price.
My dude, your desire for more money is the bubble that’s holding back the sale.
Your scenario is a microcosm of the whole market.
I’m assuming they’re looking to buy after this condo sale. If that’s the case, they may not have much choice as their next place will be similarly insanely inflated, so they need that money to get the monthly payment to something affordable.
That’s the position my partner and I are in. We have equity in our house, but it’s mostly because it has “appreciated” to a level that we could never afford, despite making a combined over quarter million dollars a year (due to living in a high cost of living area). Even if we sold our house at full inflated market price and used it all as a down payment, we’d be hard pressed to afford a place with the same price.
It’s not that I’m complaining about the equity, it just doesn’t get me much when everything else is insanely inflated. We barely squeaked into the place we’re in because COVID tanked interest rates and prices in our area.
I’ll never understand people like this. Most of us will never own a home at this rate. Yet there are folks, who already own their home, who are complaining they can’t switch their home like it’s some trading-card game. They’re part of the problem.
Yup, I’m a total cocroach and the scum of society for wanting to have somewhere that me and my pregnant wife can live with room to grow with the little one.
I suppose we should decide to not sell and instead rent it out at extreme rates? Or perhaps raise a child in a place who would never have a room of their own?
I fully acknowledge that I’m privileged to have gotten a decent job and we happened to be in the right place at the right time, but comparing a single family trying to better their circumstances to the oligarchs and international entities who hoard land and homes for profit is a shit thing to do.
You’re not a cockroach, but you should have considered attempting to move before conceiving. You were in a privileged position, not because you were capable enough to find a decent job, which you are and should be proud of, but that you have a whole home for your family already. No one forced you to add an additional member, and thus feel overcrowded. There are consequences to your decisions.
I’m not comparing you to an oligarch, but you have to understand that many young adults who want to own just their first home simply can’t.
Holy fuck man. Fuck off and go eat the rich. I’m not your enemy. You are owed no explanation or glimpse into the YEARS of family planning and medical problems we’ve faced to be where we are now. Just because someone is able to squeak their way into the game the world leaders play is not an attack on you.
Sorry, I forgot you’re the exception to the rule. No one else has ever had to deal with medical issues preventing them from having children, as well as not having a home. You’re the main character and everyone else can “fuck off”.
I’ll let you get back to your little pity party, dealing with the effects of your choices. I hope you can make a nice profit on your current home, since that’s clearly what you want.
Also its a fucking condo.
And?
Only a small subset of folks want to live in a condo.
…and? This isn’t news.
According to the convincing argument by Gary Stevenson, so long as wealth inequality persists, assets are going to just get more expensive.
It’s not collapsing, Jack.
Going from 100 middle class people buying and selling 100 homes amongst each other to 2 extremely wealthy people 100 homes amongst each other and 98 people renting. The rich guys will price the assets out of reach of everyone else and make up the difference in rental profits.
It’s worth noting that there just isn’t enough supply that’s actually in play in the market to rent or buy. Housing has two levels of demand because shelter is a need: there’s the inelastic demand (I need shelter and I’ll pay almost any price to make sure I have it) and elastic demand (I want to buy a house as an investment or a vacation property). This bubble isn’t going to pop because it’s not a true bubble; the supply of housing is below the need for housing that manifests as demand (the inelastic demand), which has sent the price skyrocketing because you’ve got people trying to satisfy a very deep inelastic demand with very shallow inelastic supply. That’s had the knock-on effect of making it so that now the people just trying to find shelter are directly competing against people trying to find investments, and while the investors almost always have more money than you do, it also means that the price ceiling (the absolute maximum anyone is willing to pay for that property) gets raised even higher.
The reason why we got here, why the supply got so low on the first place, is because we basically stopped building houses after 2006. Even when we did start building houses again, I think the rate at which we’re building them never fully recovered. There’s a few other problems I’d be happy to get into, but here’s the gist: the only housing really getting built without federal grant money is single family homes. We are NEVER going to solve the housing crisis by building not quite enough single family homes year over year. It just takes too much time and money to build too little capacity. So, what can you do about it?
Well, there’s great news. If you live in a city or even a modest size town, and most people do, there’s a really good chance you have a city council that meets regularly. This council has A LOT of control over what gets built in your city or town! In fact, they can control the zoning, and if your city is like mine, it’s probably 90% exclusionary low-density single family home zoning by surface area, and probably has outrageous parking minimums that all but guarantee both a housing supply shortage and a lack of services (groceries, small cafes, etc) in those neighborhoods (which also raises your cost of living because now you NEED a car). They always have a public comment period so that people can raise issues that they feel are important.
Go to these council meetings and tell at them about how there isn’t enough housing being built. They will cry about how they can’t control the free market, but they can and do via zoning codes. If you keep the pressure up over time, you can make progress. If you meet other like-minded people there and network with them, you can make progress. You can get out there and make this change, it is within your reach.
Like 10% of all housing sits vacant, the lack of supply in the market is not just a lack of units, it’s also a strategy by investors to keep prices high.
I see, so we must collapse Blackrock first.
Just be aware that BlackRock is capitalism’s final boss.
Wait, they own the equivalent of 1/3 US yearly GDP?
Not only do BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street own everything, they also own shares in each other. Antitrust is dead; it’s basically one big monopoly. These three firms own corporate America
In Germany real estate became significantly cheaper in many parts (not all, not e.g. Berlin or Hamburg). In my north German mid size city we had ~15 percent price reduction in the last 2 years. In our neighbour city they even had 25%.
On the other hand, I know people who sold their houses when prices where high, invested their money and are happy renters now. It apparently can be a lot better financially according to many experts (here in Germany, no idea about the US).
No, but they can remain solvent longer than you can survive on the streets.
And that’s how they get you.
they have enough money to remain solvent for generations.
and they’re using our retirement money to do it
I’d love to buy your condos - but if we look at renting versus buying… It’s cheaper to rent versus buy until mortgage rates drop below 6%. We’ll just be sitting here adding to the mortgage payment pile until then.
A house is laughably out of reach.
What if they start a huge fire and burnt down a ton of houses if they couldn’t hold out anymore?
Or luigi blackrock
I want those 2015 prices
Why stop there? 1950s, please. Even if you adjust for inflation, a mortgage would be a small fraction of what rent is.
I heard the standard of houses were poorer then which was part of the pricing issues.
Isn’t it Blackstone and not blackrock that buys homes (and not that many)?
Blackrock is part of the big three (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street). They own a portion of almost everything, including each other.
So it’s often the case that Blackrock is involved, even indirectly.
https://theconversation.com/these-three-firms-own-corporate-america-77072
