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Comment by chadboyda | Hacker News Reader

Thinking of a house as an investment is foolish. Do you think of your car that way? No. Homes are commodities that like your car depreciate in value. Building homes has like anything manufactured at scale, come down significantly in cost. This is making it possible to build many more homes at a much faster rate. The days of homes being an investment are long over and will probably never return.

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Cars and homes are completely different animals. Yes, home prices have been inflated, etc. But property is a very scarce resource and is generally a good investment over the long term. Just because you can build homes quickly doesn't mean that they will be in places that people want to live. Those places will always be highly valued.

Property is a scarce resource in some places. Often the difference is how property is released into the housing markets, and what can be built on it.

For many purposes, Australia and Texas are comparable. Yet Texas has far cheaper housing than Australia. The difference, according to some researchers (and I agree) is that Australia has very complex, overlapping zoning laws and constricted land release; Texas does not.

Another interesting case is Germany. In Germany you have a constitutional right to build a home. Germany has apparently had, in real terms, quite flat house prices for a long time despite not being particularly land-rich compared to places like Texas or Australia.

Interesting. Do you have more information on both the texas/australia and the texas/germany comparisons?

Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich at the Centre for Independent Studies is the main researcher who I saw these comparisons from:

http://www.cis.org.au/research-scholars/cis-research-scholar...

I can't locate the Texan comparison, but here's one discussing the UK and Germany:

http://www.cis.org.au/media-information/opinion-pieces/artic...

The same comparison again -- the charts are quite telling:

http://macrobusiness.com.au/2011/06/how-germany-achieved-sta...

Thanks :-)

cars are liabilities: they cost you money to own and you can't sell them for more than you paid for them, classic cars aside. houses are different because...? they still require expensive maintenance like a car, upkeep in the form of insurance and property taxes... houses are only assets when you are better off than renting or you are renting the house and turning a profit.

I think house prices were also driven up by dual income families who can afford more expensive housing.

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