> Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
This is a _really_ popular meme, but it's not true. About 50% of new homes are bought by owner-occupiers, about 25% by local authorities and approved housing bodies (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authorit...), 10% pension funds and institutions (these are the 'private corporations' you refer to), and the remainder are small landlords, holiday homes etc etc.
I think sometimes people see "50% of new homes are bought by owner occupiers" and read it to mean "and thus the other 50% are bought by evil corporations" (people also tend to forget about the 'new' bit; second-hand homes are much more likely to be bought by owner-occupiers, as REITs and pension funds largely don't want to touch them, and nor do approved housing bodies; local authorities do sometimes buy individual second-hand homes, usually from private landlords), but really the bulk of the remainder is social housing.
The ridiculous rents are driven by the fact that we're just not building enough homes. Not that we're not building a lot; we have one of the highest per capital rates of homebuilding in the OECD, but there was a period of 7 or 8 years where we built almost nothing, and that's a really hard gap to bridge.
If sufficiently masochistic you can also wrestle it out of the CSO's horrible website for 2024, I think.
It's about 1/3rd AFAIR.
I do agree that Ireland has experienced a massive change in house prices from 15 years ago, but 15 years ago was the bottom of a bust after the boom so potentially not the right comparison point.
I do mostly agree with your points, and it's really bad but it's important to contextualise some of those points.
This is caused by an Irish cultural distaste for apartments - as they're generally not setup for modern living, are typified by poor soundproofing and insulation, and marred by fire insulation and other scandals - leading to a decreased stock. Include the Help-To-Buy scheme applicable only to new-build houses on greenfield estates, and the HAP social-welfare payment which set an artificial floor on rents for apartments, and its the case that the average apartment rent is 1.5-2x the cost of servicing the mortgage at a 90% LTV.
This results in an average rent in Dublin of €2,500, with Open-market rents in the capital rising at annual rate of 5.2%. The most recent median (50th percentile) salary is €43,221, which comes from a 2023 CSO report. That's a monthly net salary of €3,000 per person.
The National Asset Management Agency, set up in the recession to take on all the in-default property and babysit it till prices rose again, has a huge part to play. Combine this with a non-fit-for-purpose Planning and Appeals process, and you literally have builders suing the government for blocking developments.
As of November 1st 2024, there were just over 2,400 homes available to rent across the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF IRELAND, down 14 per cent on the same date a year previously and well below the 2015-2019 average of almost 4,400.
All of this laid the foundations for disaster. Now the increased materials and energy costs since Covid-19, combined with a relative collapse in our building sector prior, have meant that building apartments in Dublin has largely become commercially unfeasible, as construction costs are now higher than what buyers are willing to pay.
https://www.independent.ie/business/unviable-construction-st...
> In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to 34 live with their parents as of 2024.
It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.
the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating. but the younger generation is absolutely screwed
Only if you sell it, and move somewhere with a much lower cost of housing.
There is also less need to get the maximum possible loan if house prices are lower as a ratio to income.
after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers. i know of one specific house that is empty for the majority of the year purchased by foreign owners specifically for their kid to live while attending college. the kid chose to not go to that school, so the house sits empty except for when some property manager comes by to "check in" on the place.
so while this thread is discussing still showing decent ownership percentages, those numbers are glossing over some of the "trends" in modern real estate.
> after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies that prevent housing from being built.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property
Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.
That's why your anecdote is meaningless and can be dismissed immediately.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest increases in supply.
https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/f9a5ef47d06143e6b8355cfad...
Here's a size list that is commonly shared https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
When you figure in # of people in such houses, the avg person has vastly more space https://www.reddit.com/r/REBubble/comments/14hayqq/average_h...
I bought my house in 2018. It was built in 1997
It is not vastly larger than it was in 1997, but I still paid 2018 prices for it
Most people aren't buying new builds
A few years back, median age of sold house was 27 years. So by that metric you bought even a newer house than the majority of house sales.
Your 1997 house is almost certainly much larger than the median 1950 house.
And, your single data point in no way invalidates aggregate statistics.
They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.
And those old folks that took their home equity and used it to buy property for an AirBNB are in fact an example of the rich/old folks screwing the young generation hard. (Other examples: vote to reduce taxes, to increase tuition, stop the free market from building more housing, do nothing on global warming, let the economy be swallowed by health care and financialized scams). As are the people that own and rent 3 houses, while their grandkids have to move far away. (Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, and my adult kids will never be able to live near me).
Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you have the discipline to stick excess money in the market consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better than just using a house as a forced savings account. In my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to 10+% [1]).
However, for markets with low construction and strong demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead. Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental market for renting to be worse so the general situation is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.
[1]: https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements
I will also note, that the notion of having access to a cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up defaulting and then losing their home in the process.
The overall state of the economy will still need another major shakedown before those elements of society get their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so who knows when that would happen.
Property taxes, HOA fees, maintenance, appliances randomly breaking and resulting in bills of thousands of dollars...
the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out
If you care about the sale price you will worry about that, among many other things.
Marks on the walls from hanging pictures is not going to meaningfully change the sale price of a house, please be serious
However it could absolutely lose you your damage deposit when renting
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.