Even if there was a sudden influx of these smaller homes onto the market, few would be able to afford them.
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I doubt that, as most people are buying larger homes and most people own a home.
People are buying larger homes; I can't deny that. And most own a home sure. But, the current supply is minimal and those who are selling are doing their best to take advantage of current market conditions by drastically overestimating property values. I know some of the biggest lenders plan on increasing mortgage rates very soon and sure property prices may have seen a temporary decrease, but clearly only to increase short-term demand. Not sure what the current conditions are in your hometown. But... I don't know 🤷♂️. Everything's a mess.
House prices are down here, per m², this year, but the houses are getting gigantic, so the prices are high. What really hurts is the higher interest rate.
Younger people don't actually know what houses used to be like and it's getting harder to find 80s-style housing because it's basically illegal, now.
My first apartment was 12 m² and had a gas stove in the corner.
My uncle's apartment, that I live in for a while, had no central heat or hot water and only two bedrooms, so we kids always had to double-up. One toilet and the bathtub had a wood-fire boiler (the only heater in there 🥶), so we only bathed every couple of days. Oil stove in the dining room.
No big refrigerator or freezer, either, and laminate countertops and floors.
Then the landlord renovated it in the 90s and nearly doubled the rent.
And nobody had air conditioning. It wasn't a thing.
i hate aircon... makes the air inside dry and positive charged and the environment outside cold and wet
just walk around a city these days to notice how wet the microclimate is in winter
my preference for heating is old school carbon coils in quartz tubes like the original dim orange incandescent lamps... plus they give you lots of reddish IR light which i'm pretty sure is good for your health... just have to sit em close to you... and an air purifier for the dust, the air indoors in winter is abominable
I also hate air conditioning. It is one of the main reasons I left Texas. The dry air and freezing to death in the summer. 🥴
Like living in a giant refrigerator, with cold air blasting at you, all day.
I loved our new fireplace insert, in Maryland. Could heat the whole house, if we left the doors open.
Even when we moved to Texas, in the early 90s, lots of people lived in small homes, some with no air conditioning or central heat. You were doing pretty well with a rancher the size of a mobile home and a swamp cooler or whole-house fan. And lots of trailers. Most of my relatives lived in trailers.
They would have screen doors, front and back, and they would open both and let the air through, to cool.
And always only one toilet.
Remember shotgun houses?
It will get interesting when the Boomers begin to die off and Gen Xers get older. Previous generations were taught to expect that the value of their homes would go up when they were ready to sell. Thus, they were able to climb a ladder of wealth predicated on ever-rising home values.
The problem is, this assumes that the next generation will be more prosperous than you are, and able to buy the same home for a higher price. That is no longer true, certainly not to the extent it was. Interest rates aside, I'd expect to see home values start to plateau, unless supply is kept artifically low.
That last line is already happening in my area as blackrock, et al. have been snapping up hundreds of homes as they come on the market. Entire neighborhoods that were homeowners are now 100% rentals at an astronomical monthly rent.
Investors trying to convert everything into Airbnbs is another big problem. Some cities have begun to seriously crack down on short-term rentals.
I can imagine property values plateauing sooner than most expect, within a year perhaps. Then, once the market pops, people will take a breather to wait and see how low property prices will go before demand begins to rise again. Of course, if immigration issues continue to escalate, the government will surely just swoop in beforehand and buy up whatever properties aren't being sold after the crash to house them.
We were actually interested in buying two smaller fixer-upper houses near here, as we're used to renovating, but the municipality bought both of them, renovated them, and now they house migrants.
That's where a lot of property has disappeared to. Impossible to compete with the state because they just offer more than the highest bidder.
It's the same with renting. Rentals all go to the state. No way to keep up.
sane people are nomads these days... unless there is low chances of eminent domain expropriation... the majority of Western governments are straight up cryptocommunist
The state loves illegal immigrants. The more the merrier! Lol. No one I've spoken to believes me when I tell them this.
Yes, they always act surprised that so many are coming and it's like 🥴
I'm always like "Do you really think a country as wealthy and with as many resources as ours would have second-rate border security? 😑"
Fr. I grew up next to the East German Wall and everyone be like "you can't use a wall to control people's movements".
lol but yet they live on a piece of land called a country that is surrounded by fences and walls that they cannot breach to get out without permission and call it freedom.
The people who are buying a home are likely the same people who are working from home. The requirement of an effective office room necessitates a larger home than maybe they would have bought in the before-times. If two people in the household are working from home, maybe even larger still.
During the first year or so of the pandemic, I shared a small room, converted to an office, with another member of my household, and a third person had a desk just outside the door. It was not ideal. Fortunately, it was only temporary, but if that was the new normal, I would absolutely be looking for a larger house.