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Comment by tkel | Hacker News Reader

There's loads of other inefficiencies as well. Moving is a huge hurdle. It's difficult to find housing that meets dozens of conditions, and even then you don't respond to supply + demand imagined equilibrium, you pay more or pay less to live near friends or family. It's something you only do a handful of times in your whole life. Trying to use the same analysis as for buying a can of beans is absurd. You might need to take econ 201 before you understand why econ 101 is wrong about housing.

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> It's difficult to find housing that meets dozens of conditions

Correct. That's why when there's more housing you're more likely to find what you need.

False. Even if you don't move, people move all the time and that moves the needle for everyone.

“People like to drink certain kinds of beer” and “some people don’t drink beer often” are not arguments against supply and demand driving beer prices.

Prices in massively inefficient markets do not follow the supply + demand equilibrium. Beer is not an inefficient market. You're doing the absurd comparison.

It's more correct to say supply and demand still drive the overall average, but in a high-friction market of unique items, every single case is still a unique case. It's not like moving wheat bushels or RAM chips. When they sell oil, they mix up all the oil from different producers in the same reservoir, in the same tanks. Electricity travels in the same wires. Housing is nothing like that.

"they mix up all the oil from different producers in the same reservoir"

Only when avoiding sanctions, not normally. And housing does follow economic principles no matter how much you wish that wasn't so.

Housing doesn't follow economic principles that only apply to homogeneous bulk products, that's the point. Electricity is almost perfectly homogeneous. Then you have things like wheat and bread, which vary in quality but are close substitutes. Housing's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. No two units are alike and they only trade every few years at best.

housing isn’t an inefficient market. It’s surprisingly liquid for how large the purchases are

You need Econ 301 and stats 101 to see Econ 201 is wrong.

Not really, it used to be the case that a full third of Americans moved every year. Obviously life is more complicated than econ 101, but it's also obvious that a current undersupply of housing is one of, if not the primary, drivers of home pricing. Admittedly other factors like the governments interference in the home loan space have also had large effects on the market over the last century.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/america...

I'm not clear: does Econ 201 inform us as to how demand and supply are not related to price?

it says "it's complicated".

Yes, you learn why supply + demand curves do not actually describe many markets

So, if instead of installing a bunch of apps, setting up search filters, and refreshing browser tabs on my phone ever 15-30 minutes, then the instant something meets my parameters I immediately leave work and, if possible, make a deposit on a new place, I open an app and find 5000 places meeting my requirements, meet them when I'm not working and on my time, and tell them I like a different one better so I'll hold off before making a decision, makes no difference on the price?

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