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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

i would suspect as much. Home prices have been, as they cyclically trend to do, wildly inflated and overheated for quite some time now. Most homes command a minimum of 250k no matter where you look, with many of them existing as mere flophouses converted for a few thousand dollars with the cheapest lumber yard fixtures in an offensive attempt to cash in on the puerile american practice of "flipping" properties.

The market is sorely overdue for a massive "correction" to respect the near 40% unemployment in the US, widespread rioting, and crippling pandemic. Id put the counter at six months, but so far everything has defied the yield curve inversion and continued to run like a race car on nitrous. sooner or later somethings got to give.

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I 100% agree with this. We built our home in 2009 for an even $100,000. I live 40 minutes from the nearest 'urban' center, and probably 20 minutes from the closest 'town' (less than 600 people). Now, granted, we put a massive amount of sweat equity into this home, but

It's current appraisal sits at $275,000.

That is just unbelievable. It's not realistic. It's completely removed from any sort of reality. I mean, we have a nice house, don't get me wrong, but it's not worth over a quarter of a million dollars.

And that is every house within 20 miles of me. In the last two years our values have skyrocketed, and nobody knows why.

> it's not worth over a quarter of a million dollars

What is worth a quarter million? How do you assess the value of your home?

The home was assessed at over a quarter of a million dollars, for both taxes this year, and by an independent assessor when we refinanced.

I'm saying I have a decent home, but that amount of money is unrealistic. It cost $100,000 to build, 11 years ago. I cannot be convinced it almost tripled in value, in any realistic market, in 11 years.

What’s the value of the land and the sweat equity? You may have paid $100k and time but the buyer is paying all in currency for the finished product.

Land is maybe 20k, 25-27k at a stretch. 15-20k in sweat equity, if I had to guess.

The math just isn't there.

What have comparable homes sold for in your area recently?

I don't think you are thinking about this correctly. Have you considered the impact of compound interest? You say it cost you $100,000 plus "a massive amount of sweat equity" . I don't know what you consider massive, but let's guess at $50,000 worth. That is, if you were paying market rates at the time to professionals, how much would they have charged, plus the cost of hiring them, plus the taxes you would have paid to have the money to pay them, etc?

Anyway, if we start with an actual "cost" of $150,000, you get to $250,000 with 11 years of compound interest at 5%. If we instead completely ignore your labor input, 11 years at 9% gets us from $100,000 to $250,000. Can you really not be convinced that "realistic market" might not have a 5% (or 9%) yearly increase in value? That's not to say it will always go up that much, but it doesn't seem unrealistic that it might.

The bigger question of course is how we determine "value". Is $250,000 for a house today any more "realistic" than $100,000 to build it 11 years ago? Not by any objective measure. They are both just numbers, determined by how much people are willing to pay, which in turn depends on how much they have in their bank accounts, which in turn depends on how much someone is willing to pay them, which (circularly) depends on how much someone else is willing to pay for something else. There's nothing "realistic" about any particular numeric value.

Inflation is about 2-3% per year, so that brings the real appreciation down to 2-6%.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, however. The 2008 stimulus plan basically printed money in the form of increased stock valuations and cheap mortgages. Stocks and housing have inflated well over 3% per year since then, while consumer prices have not.

Eventually that has to unwind. One option is for the federal government to claw the money back. That will lead to deflation and immediate economic ruin, so they can’t do it.

The more likely option is that we eventually hit a patch of high consumer price index inflation as workers start charging a living (housed) wage for their time.

> Stocks and housing have inflated well over 3% per year since then, while consumer prices have not.

Pretty much only the west coast has seen inflating home prices. For the rest of the country, inflation adjusted price per square foot hasn't really changed [0]. And Inflation adjusted Annualized S&P 500 Returns with Dividends Reinvested for the past 15 years are 6.738% versus 7.690% for the 15 years before that [1].

0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

[1]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

It doesn't really matter what it cost to build or how much time elapsed.

Try to sell it, see what kind of offer(s) you get--that's exactly to the penny what the home's value is.

I just sold my home for just about 3x what I paid for it in 2009 (used house though)

[shrug] Between 1998 and 2003 my house in Minneapolis doubled in value. A year later (after I sold) it had gone up by 50%.

Tripling in value after 11 years, when you bought at the bottom of the market doesn't seem surprising at all.

2009 was near the bottom of the housing crisis in the US. You picked a really good time to build. While housing prices are likely overheated, it’s not where we were in 2007, at least adjusted for inflation.

Prices are high because of stupid low interest rates, an economy that had been strong till March, and probably a few demographic trends (echo boomers finally having kids).

When we pay the piper for this crisis I think we’ll see prices drop, but not at 2008 levels

Time to sell? Rent for a year or two?

If someone actually paid $275k for your home, then it definitely is worth $275k. But right now that value is just theoretical (maybe real for purposes of taxation, but that doesn't always reflect what a buyer will pay). The moment money changes hands, it becomes real.

Part of the problem is that a quarter of a million dollars isn't worth a quarter of a million dollars any more. c.f inflation

I sure hope so, right now the median home price is 4.5x the median income. If that continues to increase, we’ll be creating a generation of renters captured by whoever had the ability to borrow money to purchase the inflated assets.

4.5x sounds unbelievably amazing. In my home city it's around 16x.

16x is extreme. Silicon Valley is a bit under 10x.

Vancouver, Canada has sky-high home prices but is missing the high-paying jobs of the Valley. Rent isn't too bad though, so quality of life can be pretty good.

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