The median US home price was $219,000 at the start of the 2010s, $165,300 at the start of the 2000s, and just $124,800 at the start of the 1990s.
US home prices have soared 47% so far this decade.
The price surge has outpaced the gains seen in the 1990s and 2010s, and is nearly ahead of the 2000s.
The rising value of homes has coincided with a millennial-fueled demand surge and years of low mortgage rates.
US home prices have soared 47.1% so far this decade, according to a ResiClub analysis of the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.
The massive price gains seen in the first four years of the 2020s have eclipsed all of the growth seen in the 1990s and 2010s, according to the analysis. Housing prices in those two decades grew 30.1% and 44.7%, respectively.
On top of that, housing price growth in the 2020s is on the verge of eclipsing all of the growth seen in the 2000s, which was 47.3% after peaking at just over 80% before the 2007 housing market crash.
This might sound good for people who own their home already but all it does is lock them in. You can't move, trade up/down if no one else can afford to buy.
And when prices are inflated they tend to reach a price cap. This means the variance between a small and large house shrinks. This means selling a big house to buy a smaller one nets you very little profit which encourages people not to sell. Which decreases the market of affordable homes.
But corporations with the goal of owning all property to rent seek don't care. They'll overpay to hold houses a while until they can corner the rent market and charge through the nose.
It's these deep pocket corporations that I think will keep a major housing bubble burst from happening or when it happens it will be fast.
They can buy x number of houses now at these inflated prices, they can but 10x X number of houses with a major downturn in home values. Then with all this buying of homes the prices shoot back up... At least that is how my high school level economics knowledge brain sees it.
As long as housing is considered an investment, it will never be affordable. Concrete and wood degrade overtime, so the only way the price of a house can go up is if the supply of houses gets progressively smaller while demand continues to increase. Rising housing prices are a direct result of municipal authorities failure to zone appropriately.
They are purposefully anti-housing. That is the point. And no, it is not to drive prices up but instead to ensure someone doesn’t buy the place next door and turn it into a toxic waste processing plant.
Zoning laws serve a good purpose in many locations. They also serve to maintain NIMBYism, but that is a second order effect.
Those numbers mean nothing without knowing the local wages. In my neighborhood the lowest priced 800 sqft homes are 950k and one bedroom rent is $2400. So your area sounds like a killer deal.
Looking at FRED economic data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS), it looks like thats where they got their figures. As far as I can tell is it not inflation adjusted. They have picked the Q4 results for each year as base for the 1 Jan.
When adjusted for inflation, the increase in value since the 1990s is much less AND the increase was biggest between 2010-2020.
Also on their own figures in the article; between 2020 and now the median price is up 28% without inflation adjustment, and 7% with. Compared to 1990 the median price corrected for inflation is up 40%, but the biggest jump is 2010-2020; it began 2020 32% above the 1990 price.
The point? House prices are up, but inflation has been uneven over that period, with a big spike recently - the dramatic figures in the article may not reflect the real story. According to the calculators from 2020 to 2024 the total inflation rate is 21.54%; equivalent to 4.7% a year. Inflation accounts for much more of the perceived price rise than the actual real value rise.
The problem with inflation is people only think about today's inflation rate. Current US inflation is 3.5% but that is on top of last years inflation, and the year before that etc. So dramatic articles like this are really of dubious value.
EDIT: The article links to "analysis" by another website ResiClib. They do not seem to have looked at inflation at all either.
It's not a bubble, it's much much worse. You only hear of it in whispers among the financial world. It's stagflation. Japan seen this story before, they call it their lost decade that has been going on for nearly half a century. It's when you deficit spend like crazy to prop up the economy and that leads to high inflation and stubbornly high costs (IE: Housing). It's coupled with basically no wage growth and high underemployment. Does any of this sound familiar? It buried Japan, it might bury USA.
This spike in Inflation isn’t that high in the grand scheme of things and we have both historically low unemployment and higher than average labor force participation.
The current situation doesn’t resemble stagflation.
No one in real-estate is doubting it being a bubble. The issue is how it will resolve. Not all bubbles burst. The question is if this one is going to simply "cool down" until the market rate catches up (lol, pipedream) or if the propping up will simply plateau it and it will level off for some years for the market rate the then catch up (almost the same thing, still a fucking joke when they try to justify this). Or there is the option of the bubble popping, it then it is the question of how deep the market cut will go, how fast it will rebound, how far up it will rebound, and if it is still worth it to buy now (what some are saying is that it is still worth doing the current fuckery and still profitable even with a bubble burst).
Can we just band together as like 30 individuals and do the development ourselves? Like I want to find enough people that together we can afford to construct a set of condos without relying on some giant fucking company to do it.
Yes you can. Banks do loans for this kind of thing all the time. They prefer experience though, and so if you don't have that you will need to prove you have enough on the line that you will lose if you don't complete the deal.
Many condos are built by small companies. They build a few every month and it is enough to pay their employees and make a nice living. It is hard to break into this as the banks want to see experience, but it can be done.
As someone who has seen property values shoot up in my area even more than the average, it is such a relief to get out of the rental trap and start building equity. I know it's more complicated than this, but knowing each mortgage payment gives me a little more claim over my property and more buying power if I ever need to sell it is such a good feeling.
I hope that we can get conditions to change so that more people can access home ownership if they want it.