Hacker News Reader

Comment by zukzuk | Hacker News Reader

If interest rates to drop again in the foreseeable future, it will likely be due to an old fashioned recession.

If that happens, both mortgage rates and home prices will fall (due to lower demand / ability to pay and possibly forced selling).

The article doesn’t mention this scenario, even though it’s entirely probable. If you are waiting on the sidelines, that might actually be a good time to buy.

Of course the catch is that if the recession is bad enough to crash the housing market, you may find yourself out of a job and unable to afford anything, so the premise of the article stands — it may never be a good time to buy a house, at least not in the average buyer’s circumstances.

View on HN

If it is a "good time to buy" then prices will rise again as demand increases from (presumably) cash buyers or investors buying up things cheap. Unless you mean in minor towns and cities, where prices are only kept up by hope and expectations. Any meaningful "dip" in prices in somewhere like NYC or London and you'll find huge action from foreign investors as they swoop in to capitalise

In my opinion, house prices never "go down" in major world cities - you'll perhaps have a little 3-5% wobble for a year or so, but typically prizes just stay the same for a long time if it is a "bad market". Then when conditions improve they just start going up again. You only ever see major corrections in the xx% range of permanent decreases in places where it was a bubble and no one wanted to live in the first place. You'll very likely never get this in a NYC, SF, London type place unless there is some other huge once-in-250-years mayjor even type thing (e.g. London getting flattened in WW2 etc)

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a big difference between “good time to buy” for the “average” buyer vs someone who has been hoarding capital waiting to jump in at a better time.

A recession probably will create a good opportunity for those who have been waiting and are in a position to avoid getting hammered by that recession. That is probably not the “average” buyer, but maybe more representative of some of the people here on this forum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com