It would be interesting to see long-term results of off-sites in which a company's executives and an equal number of long-tenured average-performing and high-performing employees gather to share and learn from each other, with follow-up on-site meetings to experiment and execute afterward.
I have never encountered an off-site like this, but if you have, how did it go?
Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).
Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).
Completely agree with this; it should not be experienced as a videogame, it should be experienced as a real responsibility as in, "This is what I'm 100% focused on because it's the most important thing I'm doing right now."
Funny enough VCRs had this decades ago, the double-fast-forward skipped forward a few minutes. Why e-readers can't do this with a similar symbol to skip forward 25 pages is a mystery to me.
Once, when facing a great personal crisis, I found some wisdom that helped me reframe my worries and fears: "Why do you spend all your time worrying about the blizzard on top of the mountain? Go around the mountain."
Secondly, in grad school I was upset that other students appeared to be cheating during exams, to the point that I could hear messages pinging in the classroom. A friend told me, paraphrased: "You can't control what other people do. You'll just have to do well enough that it doesn't matter." I didn't want to hear it, but once it sunk in, he was right and accepting his advice was the best path forward.
Another possibility/question I was idly wondering about is whether they were proportionately larger for juveniles and served some purpose that full-grown adults did not need. Maybe digging out of nests? - though I think specializations only for hatching (e.g. egg teeth) tend to disappear shortly after.
Thanks for the paper! It seems that, while the juvenile limbs were proportionately longer than they were in adults, they were still tiny (figures 2 and 3.)
> Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter.
This strikes me as funny because of all the canonically silver iMacs and Macbooks that came afterward. Is black even an option?
Steve loved black, until he loved glossy pastels, then rich Corinthian leather interfaces and then brushed aluminum. This was one of the most very frustrating things about designing user interfaces for him; once you figured out his internal design language, he would radically change it overnight!
I think this is a huge part of his success. That clarity makes buying simpler for customers. You get the color that your device is supposed to be. Period.
The techspec page for the product is buried on the Apple Store app. Personalities such as MKBHD on YT is who I rely on to figure out what the product is targetted at.
You ain't kidding. Jobs gave people the choice of good, better, or best. That was it. 3 options and you probably already knew which one you were walking out with.
I am just not sure about this. There are more Millennials than Gen X, and Millennials are in their prime family-building and house-buying years. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, not much new housing was built. The intersection of those two trends might mean demand exceeds supply purely mathematically. Especially if people who locked in mortgages at lower rates are reluctant to sell as a result, furthering lowering supply.
Certainly prices may come down in some locations as interest rates go up if there aren't enough cash buyers, but will it be enough to counteract the imbalance of demand and supply? I think it's an open question.
My 30-year mortgage is locked in at 2.875%. My overall mortgage payments would go up 60% if I took out a new loan for the same amount at 7%.
On one hand, this means that prices need to come down to get houses into peoples' price ranges. On the other hand, if the market is down, there's no way in hell that I'm selling my house. A loan at 2.875% is almost like having free money, so even if I need to move, I'd prefer to rent out my house than sell it.
It's unclear if we will see low prices, but fewer sellers, or high prices, but fewer buyers. What's clear though is that this is going to be a low liquidity housing market without a lot of transactions.
> A loan at 2.875% is almost like having free money, so even if I need to move, I'd prefer to rent out my house than sell it.
I've watched a lot of friends go through this thought process recently. Locally, the thought process grinds to a halt when they see the exorbitant prices that property management firms are charging for new customers these days. Apparently there's a huge spike in the number of people trying to become landlords because they don't want to give up their low mortgage rates, like you. Property management firms are taking advantage of this.
I also see a lot of people changing their minds when they do the math on the size of down payment they'd need and the monthly cost of a 7% mortgage on the types of houses they want to move to. There's a reason people talk about starter homes and trading up as opposed to accumulating additional properties every time they move to a nicer house.
OTOH, I know a number of well compensated software engineers who were trying to pour their money into real estate investments. All of them are very firmly paused on buying new properties at the moment.
Because it's significantly more work than you'd expect to rent out a place and manage it.
Some people get lucky with golden tenants who never cause trouble, pay on time, and even fix little things on their own.
Others get unlucky and have to deal with a neverending stream of issues, from dealing with payment issues to having to leave work in the middle of the day to handle the issue of the week.
The laws around being a landlord are also more complex than you'd expect. In many locations, you can't show up and fix things on a rental by yourself unless you're a licensed contractor. A lot of landlords ignore that and do it anyway, but if anything goes wrong then you have a target on your back as soon as the tenant engages with a lawyer. Hiring a property management company is a way to pay someone else to handle all of that and take a significant legal liability off of your shoulders.
I remember early in my career I worked with a guy who thought he was going to manage a couple rentals on the side while doing his SWE job. He ended up getting PIPed because he was missing so many meetings and had to disappear all the time to deal with the latest issues at one of his locations, or even just to try to find new tenants after the constant turnover.
Anyone who owns a house for long (the older the house, the more true it is), knows that it requires constant small bits of care here and there to make it ‘work’. A bit of maintenance on the exterior here, some yelling at a new yard guy who is mangling something here, getting a plumber in to fix a blocked drain there, add some untangling who gets to figure out the fence contractor on top, and you’re looking at work. Not full time work, but it goes on the pile.
If it doesn’t happen, it goes into a maintenance backlog that will make your head spin later, and possibly your wallet implode.
If you live there, it’s usually straightforward enough to fit it in with everything else, but can be exhausting on it’s own.
Through something major in (roof leak? AC breakage?), add it being in an area you don’t live in anymore, and gets harder.
Then, you can have tenants that aren’t absolutely perfect, and it gets even harder and more tiring. Late payments? Property damage? Neighbor complaints?
If you pick good tenants each time and nothing goes wrong, it can be great. It only takes one case of it not for things to get really unpleasant and overwhelming however.
Also, add in the Covid eviction moratoriums, which opened a whole additional can of worms for landlords - if something happens like that again, which precedent has now been set - you could spend years paying a mortgage and upkeep on a place with zero income from it.
Personally, I never rent out a place unless I know how to do an eviction in the local jurisdiction. I hope I never would have to, but not knowing how is a good recipe to lose your shirt and possibly any future gains you could ever hope to have.
I’ve known folks that had renters who seemed perfectly fine (solid full time professional jobs, etc), but left a complete trash house (literally, multiple dumpsters worth - trash to chest high), and disappeared suddenly without paying last months rent.
The underlying truth is that it takes work and management expertise + energy to maintain a house in livable condition, let alone want-to-live-in-it-condition, and that has value. Also, not everyone can, or wants to do that.
> Personally, I never rent out a place unless I know how to do an eviction in the local jurisdiction. I hope I never would have to, but not knowing how is a good recipe to lose your shirt and possibly any future gains you could ever hope to have.
I know how to do an eviction in my local market and did one in my former life as a landlord. That is precisely why I will never be a landlord again.
It’s the grind especially when you are juggling a real job.
The eviction process in my state
- first you have to give them your own personal notice.
- if they don’t pay in 7 days. Then you go to court and file paperwork with the court
- then once the tenant gets served they have a certain amount of time to reply to the notice
- then they can make up any reason to dispute it
- then you have to wait on a court date after you win. They still have a certain amount of time to pay. If they don’t…
- then the Marshall again serves a notice
- then you have to schedule a time for the marshal to oversee the eviction.
- then you have two hours to remove everything from the house on the street while the marshal is supervising. You must have a crew of 5.
- while all this is going on, you can’t enter the house or harass the tenants in any way.
- then you have to clean the place up and fix any damage.
- then you have to find and screen new tenants.
There is a reason standard underwriting only gives you credit for 75% occupancy. The effort is not worth the money. I spent years grinding out rental property between 2002-2010 and even if the housing market hadn’t crashed, I would have been better off focusing on my career.
From 2010-2020, by concentrating on my career I tripled my compensation without having to relocate. Not bragging, it’s about that of a mid level software engineer at any BigTech company in the US (I work remotely at BigTech in the cloud consulting department). Even now if I cared to, I could put in 6 months to a year worth of practicing coding interviews and probably increase it by another $100K.
Residential real estate is not “passive income” by any stretch. I am better off just investing my income from my 9-5 in REITS if I wanted exposure to real estate.
I pay a property manager, 10% rent plus VAT, plus whatever costs are involved in actually fixing stuff that needs fixing.
I do so for a few reasons: first, I have no idea what my obligations are as a landlord and they do; second, they have a list of local tradespeople whereas I live in a different country; and thirdly, the property is an apartment and the common areas and exterior were already being managed by them.
Depends on your personality and skill set. When I rented I watched the property management company do a shitty job on all of the work they did. They would treat the renters (not their customer but their customer's customer) with pure contempt. One place would not let me see the lease terms until I paid a non refundable deposit up front (I walked). Another presented a lease renewal with open ended charge backs and used pretty words to tell me how fair they were but refused to modify the lease (I moved).
On the other hand I watched my wife tell a male owner that she would not accept a rent increase and he backed down.
Overall if you only have one property, have the right skill set and personality I would say you are better off doing it yourself. If you cannot say no to a young woman then you had better let someone else take care of it for you.
This is 300% the case, and they don’t care about you, either.
You’re probably better off finding a good tenant and paying the tenant to manage themselves, paradoxically.
Rental management for the most perfect possible tenants (parents) is still a moderate annoyance and more expensive than expected. Without appreciation I’d be below zero, and even with it I’d have to do some serious work to figure out how much I’ve “made”.
Because you want to be insulated from the trouble renters can cause. Heating breaks at 7 in the morning on saturday? Time to call the landlord. They let mold destroy the bathroom? Better have insurance and now hire someone to take care of it etc.
I thought that if I ever get a duplex and rent one side out and live in the other. I would still get a property manager and never let the tenants know I own the place. For context: former landlord.
single unit landlord here… i’ve done the management myself, and i currently use a management firm (which charges me a very reasonable percentage each month).
i made the shift because i was tired of having to deal with every minor crisis myself, take time away from work to (for example) meet prospective tenants, get a new AC installed, handle the make-ready process, etc. i had a good long stretch with one tenant that was low-maintenance but they moved out suddenly with very little notice (add managing the lease agreement to the list of stuff i don’t like doing as a landlord) and a lot of work i had to do to clean up after them.
all things considered, i’m happy to fork over 5% each month to someone else to deal with those headaches.
I think a lot of people in this situation are turning to Airbnb. I've seen so many now listings where I can tell, the property is 100% investment and that the owners haave never lived there.
The problem is that due to inflation, the cost of living has sky rocketed too, at least in a lot of countries.
This means your mortgage repayments aren't the only thing that has increased, so has absolutely everything else in your life. Look at Australia for example, they're predicting the already ridiculously high food prices to go even higher, up to 7-10% due to major flooding events this year.
So your analysis kind of works, but it's not factoring in whether people feel ok about paying > $200k (AUD) or more for a house which isn't worth that much anymore (prices are going down already, many many people bought at the height of a bubble, due to FOMO), then having absolutely no money to do anything with their house to improve it (building costs are astronomical) and having no money for leisure or holidays, then you have high energy and school fees to add to all of that.
In my opinion, this is what will start to drive more people to sell. It's not just the house prices, but it's the burden of being tied to such huge debt.
Also money isn't so cheap right now, so it will slow down property speculation. Many people also bought houses thinking that if they don't like being so heavily leveraged they will just sell their property at a net gain. Not at a loss, this I think is starting to scare people.
I'd say we'll see a lot of people at least consider downsizing in the near future.
Over the past few years the appreciation on housing has meant that for many people their shelter, and entirely non-productive asset, has outpaced their own earnings. For anyone not on that rocket ship, good luck.
Sorry I meant 200k more than the current market value. I have friends in realestate in Australia who told me this. The only way they are selling property today is by dropping one to two hundred thousand off the Jan/Feb price. However many many people purchased within the last year at such inflated prices. They said during covid, most things were sold the day they were listed.
So the majority of recent buyers are servicing loans much larger than their current house is worth, and paying more interest on top of that.
I’m sure it will “go back up again”, but it doesn’t seem like there are any events in the near future which are likely to kick off another massive boom, all signals are pointing towards a property slump.
Is there any data about downsizing? It almost seems impossible to do at some level (and I'm sure depending on the area) because of an extremely short supply of smaller houses these days. I could be wrong, but this seems like the last area to cut expenses on for most families.
I think 30-year fixed mortgages are somewhat of an American phenomenon (perhaps due to the luxury of having the global reserve currency). They are not generally available in Canada or UK, where 5-year fixed rates are the norm.
When I bought (UK) five years ago, I went for a 10-year fixed rate, which was the longest I could find. Currently very happy with that choice. Shorter fixes were available at slightly lower rates, but at this point I still have 5 years of 2.64% in hand, by which time the house will be close to paid-off.
In my case I went for a 5 year fixed because if I save at the same rate in those 5 years as I have in the last 5 years (which given my mortgage repayments are 75% of the rent I was paying prior, for much more house, shouldn't be too challenging, even with the inflation), then if rates are shit in 5 years I can pay off like 40% of the mortgage after the fixed rate and still have lower payments than I do today.
I almost grabbed an ARM on one refinance because the maximum amount it could jump at each adjustment was 1%.
Years ago my dad took an ARM at 18% because the anti-usury laws limited the maximum it could go to 20% and it turned out to drop each adjustment period after that (80s wheeee)
20 year fixed interest rates are a thing in Germany. With an option for mortgage owner to buy out the lender after 10 years without additional costs. 5-10 years fixed rates are cheaper but way to risky IMHO.
The lending bank finances the mortgage on the financial markets, the spread between their interest rate and the one the bank clients get is the banks profit. Part of the terms and conditions are that those profits for the bank are what you, as the oerson taking the mortgage, owns the bank for the duration of the interest rate fix. That is capped so, by law, at 10 years. Partial down payments are negotiable, e.g. 10% of the initial loan per year. Anything above that, and prior to that 10 years, will incure the clients obligation to cover the banks lost profits (part of what you agreed to pay the bank). If the explanation makes sense.
Canada is similar - usually you can prepay up to 15%/year, but any more than that and you need to pay a penalty (which seems to be calculated based on the interest they would lose). Also the yearly prepay amount is use it or lose it.
20% lose-it-or-lose-it yearly is my experience in Canada, and I believe that's on top of being allowed to make double payments.
And yes, the prepay penalty is generally based on the interest they would lose or a few month's interest, whichever is better for the bank at the time of payment.
But also note that if you paid the extra for a 10-year, Canadian federal law says you can prepay 100% at any time after 5 years with no penalty (or virtually no penalty?). Which is part of why longer-term mortgages are markedly more expensive.
Another interesting aspect of Canadian mortgages (as opposed to US ones) is that you can't just walk away if the mortgage is underwater (which is what a pot of people in the US did after the GFC). The bank can come after you for the difference between house value and mortgage.
> In the US, I have never read about not being able to pay or a penalty for paying the entire mortgage at anytime.
My parents (we're all American) were always very careful to check that early repayment didn't come with a penalty, on mortgages and all other loans, so I assume it used to be a thing. I've always asked (following their example) and not once had the answer be "yes, there's an early-repayment fee" so maybe it's a whole lot less common than it used to be.
If I'm not mistaken US mortgage rates are several percentage points above what they would be if prepaiment was not "free". You have to pay for that option some way or another.
You can find them but they’re rare, because it messes up the resale of the loan.
Our 80/20 loan back in the countrywide heyday had a prepayment penalty on the 20 which also had a balloon. We structured our refinance to avoid the penalty.
If so, I wonder why the option is not offered when shopping for a mortgage. I have a 2.5% 30 year fixed, so it is hard to imagine a 0.5% loan, with an early repayment penalty since I would have no incentive to pay it off early anyway.
Negative interest rates were hard to imagine a few years ago but they have been a reality in many parts of the world for several years. Maybe it's not multiple percentage points and it's around one, I don't know the specifics of the calculations. But the prepayment risk in principle has to be compensated. Otherwise lenders would have no incentive to lend money to you - if you can pay it off early anyway.
"The prevalence and handling of prepayment risk differs in two respects between Europe and the US. First, while in the US prepayment costs may be priced into the interest rate, in many European countries lump-sum prepayment penalties are induced by statutory requirements. Often banks impose charges on homeowners for early repayment. These fees force households to bear part of the prepayment risk and, if the fees are sufficiently high, may deter homeowners from prepayment, thereby nullifying the prepayment risk faced by banks. An exception to this is the Danish mortgage market, where long-term fixed-rate mortgage loans with an embedded option of a penalty-free prepayment are typically offered, as in the US."
If a government wanted to encourage home ownership, it would either incentivize building more homes to bring down price, and/or give cash to people so they are able to buy. The latter option would require government taking from richer to give to poorer, or issuing new money, which is sort of the same by reducing purchasing power of money,
The long term fixed rate mortgage is where no wealth gets redistributed today, but rather from future taxpayers or users of the currency.
if government wants to encourage buying, it must make take private equity and wallstreet out of property speculation. They leave swaths of properties empty just for the purpose of land banking.
Secondary step would be to make landlord-ing less attractive by giving tenants a lot of rights, naking them hard to evict, thank kind of thing.
This would make houses less atractive as an investment asset.
Lastly you could increase property taxes, again driving down atteactivenes of hiuses to investment.
Beinging down price of houses is easy. The question is what do you do with all the people who bought a house for 500k and now its worth 250k and they are stuck
Reports 30 year fixed is about 7.32% and 5 year ARM is about 6.75%. A 10 year would be somewhere between that, but if I was choosing with less than a 52 basis point difference, I would go with 30 year fixed due to less downside risk of my mortgage blowing up.
At 30 year mortgages of 2% to 4%, no brainer to just go with 30 year even though you might pay a $1k more in interest every year. But you might not, and you definitely will not pay more than a $1k extra in interest since it is locked in.
If the 10/1 ARM was 5% and 30 year was 7%+, I would think about the 10/1 ARM.
When everyone is invested into society, we have incentives to defend the status quo, thus making our society stable. In the next generation or two we'll get to see what happens when half of the men of the nation don't own anything of substance and have no meaningful connections to society.
Yeah there’s a secret dark opposite of NIMBY - WGASA (who gives a shit anyway) and that can end up much worse in the long run.
Part of the problem for communities starts when not all participants live in the community - if the grocers and workers and police are “imports” from the suburbs or other areas you start to get divergent goals and WGASA starts to take hold.
Homeownerism sounds like a regional form of nationalism where an us Vs them conflict is actually the point. The problem is that once you understand the problem as a politician the only thing you can do is do even more nationalism by including the formerly excluded and doing an us vs the world because not having an enemy and cooperating with everyone else is unimaginable.
> On the other hand, if the market is down, there's no way in hell that I'm selling my house.
As long as you are occupying a residence, it would not effect nationwide or region-wide supply and demand, right? You selling would be offset by you buying.
Deaths, divorces, immigration, births, and of course, new construction is what would shift supply and demand curves, on average.
Yes, but in this environment, I'd probably try to buy something new without selling (but renting out instead).
Also, if lots of people are buying and selling, even if aggregate demand is the same, it's a more liquid market. If I'm a first-time homebuyer, I'd rather play in a market of musical chairs then try to buy in a theater where only the dead and divorced get up from their seats.
That's entirely true if all houses are the proverbial spherical identical house, but people chasing to remain "where they are" also slows down upgrades and downgrades.
If a family that would normally have sold their older two bedroom and moved to a four bedroom instead chooses to remain in the two bedroom longer, that two bedroom doesn't appear on the market, a four bedroom languishes.
And if nobody is building two bedroom houses, that can have ripple effects.
Says someone who probably has never been a landlord. I would rather poke both of my eyes out while getting a rectal exam than ever be a landlord again.
So if you are a first time home-buyer who needs a loan to purchase a home you are going to get shafted on interest rates, but if you already own real estate you can either buy stuff cash or sell a property and defer capital gains to buy a new one. I struggle to see how raising interest rates helps the class that is most reliant on loans to even enter the market.
I'm not sure about this either. My guess is that there are two factors at work:
1) raising rates and otherwise making money more expensive encourages capital to do something else with their money than speculate on real estate cheaply, which was a pretty appealing option over the last 5-6 years (let alone the last 2).
2) it's a mistake to rely on interest rates alone to address issues here. There's a whole raft of policy issues that should be brought into play here: progressive taxation by ownership volume and vacation-rental usage, better interest breaks for first-time homebuyers, encourage owner restoration and discourage investor-flippers. BUT every other way of addressing the policy is actually harder politically, since one party sees inequality as feature-not-bug and will actively fight attempts to address it (especially if it represents a win for their opposition), and the other has both a tenuous hold on power and a coalition that may not be all on board.
I locked in February on a 180-day lock: 3.25%. There were some documentation issues that I had to rely on a third-party (the IRS) to resolve, so I had to start looking elsewhere. Rocket Mortgage was able to lock me at 5.25% (around April/May) - this would cost me an additional $400 each month. (Fortunately the original lender was able to make to adjust what they were asking for - it wasn't a matter of not closing the loan, but it meant they had to hold it rather than selling it while the IRS gets their act together)
Millennial here. In the last 18 months I've substantially increased the % of net worth I'm comfortable allocating to a home, reflected in both purchase price and remodeling costs:
- it's not clear that pandemic-era is over, whether that be new Covid strains or other mutant viruses (not to mention global thermonuclear war)
- work from home requires much more space to do well + i'm home more often to enjoy the rest of the house
- most of my close friends work from home which means they can come and visit much more often
- due to Covid, parents are afraid of nursing homes + kids taking longer to leave the nest = intergenerational living is back on the radar
- life is short, a little bit of post-Covid YOLO
I'm not sure how widespread the sentiment is but if enough people feel this way it could make an impact.
> in the last 18 months I've substantially increased the % of net worth I'm comfortable allocating to a home, reflected in both purchase price
And in the past 18 months, the changes to interest rates mean that your budget on a standard 30 year fixed has shrunk by 40%. That is, the same payments will get you 40% less house at 20% down. To make up for that, you would have to increase both your down payment and monthly rates by 66% to afford the same dollar value as a year ago.
I'm in the process of buying a place in mostly cash. I had been saving in expensive parts of California for the past four years, so with that as my target I was able to pick up a very nice house in Portland as the price corrected from ~650 to mid-400's. The way I look at it, after seeing tech do so well in remote work, it's here to stay and I plan on dying in that house.
Yeah that's a great feeling and I apologize for my comment sounding negative, because in truth I was lucky to have it more than once. Congrats and enjoy your new home.
In theory you missed that memo in 2019, it's that Corona threw in a curveball that gave us an additional 3 years on the inevitable recession. This is why timing the market is hard.
I am assuming they are not being greedy. Around summer last year I'd say a lot have an opportunity to cash out and buy a decent house and be debt free.
But sadly many were thinking "one more year and I can afford a multimillion mansion with an infinity pool"
Not saying you are right or wrong, but you seem to be over indexing for Covid. Most people seem to have moved on finally, and even the last bastion WFH will come under pressure with the bad economy.
As things stand I'd need a significant pay rise to start working from an office again. Bills and mortgage increases have eaten the benefits I got from not having to travel so if I had to travel into work most days I'd be significantly worse off.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that WFH is somehow less productive. I've not seen much evidence of this personally. It certainly makes management harder but it's a small price to pay when it's saving a bunch of travel costs for the employee and office costs for the employer
> As things stand I'd need a significant pay rise to start working from an office again
If I am understanding the parent, the point being made is this may be less of an option for many if companies revert. If there aren't many opportunities to work remotely, this will become more of a perk, like free lunches, and not something other organizations will compensate you for. Not everyone may have a choice to demand more money if the number of WFH options are very limited.
WFH being very limited doesn't reflect the situation I'm seeing at the moment. Over half my team have been hired since WFH was introduced, almost all of them live too far away for commuting more than occasionally to be an option. One of them even got it written into his job offer that he has to do at most 1 day a month in office and he gets paid travel expenses.
Apple and Google might be able to pull it off but run of the mill non-unicorn companies? Not convinced.
Another thing to consider for the non-unicorn companies. If the big players axe WFH, the smaller companies and "non-unicorn" could be in a good position to use WFH has a hedge to attract talent. People who would apply and get hired at MANGA, but they will pass it up for the ability to live and work anywhere. My guess, there are a lot of talented engineers who would take that.
Because Google didn't rename to Alphabet. They created a parent company called Alphabet which owns Google and a bunch of other subsidiary companies, but Google is still itself and still wants to be called Google.
Whereas Facebook made a big announcement that they were renaming the company Meta. They asked to be called Meta.
Are there payrates at Alphabet lower than at Google? Typically, I have always read the acronym in relation to high paying jobs or high performing stocks.
I don't think they're lower, but they're different. Notably, Alphabet employees of the other Bets (Waymo, Loon, Verily, etc.) get stock in the bet rather than GOOG stock. This is privately held and so a lot less liquid than GOOG, and you lose your unvested shares if you transfer to the mothership. It has a lot of the same risk/reward tradeoffs as working for a startup.
I worked for what was technically an Alphabet company, and it was no different from working at Google. I was told, but never confirmed myself, that I worked for Google and Google contracted me out to the subsidiary. Maybe things have changed in the intervening 5 years since I was there, but this was something for the accountants and not something that affected everyday life.
Hiring a CFO from the banking industry did make it more difficult to get the free food, though. The cause and effect there was immediately noticeable.
I don't know if there's an implicit assumption that WFH is less productive, quite possibly. But if we look at the power dynamics of the question, it's about (tech in this case) labor being able to demand what it wants when it's in demand. I think the point above is that this dynamic will change with the economy going south.
With labor having less power, it's likely that the members of senior management who don't like WFH (for a multitude of reasons right and wrong) will have more sway in the conversation.
I'm not sure about this read either though. We've been powerfully signaled to stop considering it, but it is still out there and still spinning off new variants, some of which are worse than their precursors. It's still killing a lot of people, plus disabling who even knows how many.
It's entirely possible that on the scale of like 30-40 years, this period will be considered a "slump" in how bad covid is, or a time when we were just not considering its effects enough. I don't think this scenario is extremely likely, but I do think our collective uncertainty about long term covid effects on society is still very very high and we should be factoring that into long-term decisions like where to live, housing ownership, etc.
The high confidence people are comfortable displaying about where we are with it is not warranted, imo. It may not be a critical day-to-day concern for most people anymore. But there's no guarantee it can't go back to that state, or with the hindsight view of covid disabilities we'll have wished we kept it as a daily concern during this time.
Plus nursing homes are probably going to remain more lethal than they have been during most of our lives. I think expecting a social change around elderly care based partially on that is astute.
Just saying I share your viewpoint. I continue to wear my mask and get vaccines. We really have very little idea how continued exposure, despite vaccines, will go.
> due to Covid, parents are afraid of nursing homes
All good apart from this, its clear you don't actually have kids - interest in kindergartens didn't drop a zilch (given, where I live - Geneva, Switzerland and around, plus at home country in EU). We properly don't care about covid anymore, had it at least 4 times, last 3 times even mild flu would be much worse experience.
Sure if you are a proper germ freak or some qanon-like paranoid nut you would base your decisions on this... but if you are just another sane parent, you just drop your kids there and hope for the best. Same as with any other sickness that kids do catch often that's looming out there.
> Certainly prices may come down in some locations as interest rates go up if there aren't enough cash buyers
The interest rates make a huge difference here...a hypothetical buyer who could afford $5000/month in payments would qualify for a $1.22 million mortgage at 2.75% interest, whereas that same payment at 7% would only cover a $750k mortgage.
Cash buyers are generally about 25% of the market, which is a good chunk, but not enough to prop up prices if the other 75% of buyers they're competing with have had their purchasing power drop by 40% in the past 6 months.
> Cash buyers are generally about 25% of the market
Cash buyers often finance the property they buy. All a "cash buyer" means is that the deal is not contingent on financing, either contractually or as a practical matter. That is, they can guarantee the sale goes through with cash.
I'm not sure. Certainly many people refinanced their houses to pull money out over the past few years or got margin loans based on their stocks. Using that money to buy a (different) house gets counted as a cash buyer in the 25% number. But do you consider them a cash buyer? If they later do a HELOC to pull money out of the new house?
It's a tricky question that can really only be answered by looking at how leveraged assets in general are.
> Cash buyers are generally about 25% of the market, which is a good chunk, but not enough to prop up prices if the other 75% of buyers they're competing with have had their purchasing power drop by 40% in the past 6 months.
In aggregate in the U.S., but this and much other commentary in this thread doesn't consider enough the vast variation in local markets. There are spots where there's a higher percentage of cash buyers due to wealthier people living there, a larger contingent of foreign buyers, or people who sold homes in very expensive areas to buy in slightly-less-expensive areas. I'm seeing this where I am, where people are moving from the city (where a 1 BR apartment is easily over 1M, a 2 is 1.5-2M, etc.) to the suburbs, where an 800K house is considered pocket change.
Not to mention some people have access to "cash" without having it. Some mortgage brokers, even from large banks, can arrange to let you use collateral to help guarantee a closing within a short time (eg. 30 days) letting you waive the finance contingency.
In a given real estate transaction, someone waiving financing contingency is going to fall in to the category of "cash buyer", and it might not be obvious that the cash shown in the holdings (if it is even shown to the seller as proof of funds) came from a loan.
The price is set by the ability of other buyers. Doesn’t matter what one individual can pay if the climate points to falling prices, why would they overpay when they think prices will fall? Prices are set by willingness to lend and interest rates, not by cash buyers.
I was just responding to the poster who wrote, 25 percent cash buyers isn't enough to prop up the market.
I don't know if it's enough or not, I was making the point that that 25 percent number is in aggregate for the entire large country and there are some insane skews in local markets where the number is much higher.
But to directly answer you, if inventory is dried up, no one is listing, and the stuff that comes online is still priced like mortgage rates are 3 percent, that might kill off a large pool of buyer demand but those cash buyers are still the marginal buyers and bidding wars will ensue just the same. I'm seeing this at present.
I think what will happen though is that those cash buyers, who are not stupid, will read the direction of the rest of the market and realise the music has stopped. At which point they won’t want to buy either.
Crashes often happen in slow motion, as this one is. It’ll take years to play out.
I hope so. There's a unique situation playing out that the inventory is extremely low in parts of the country where there hasn't been a lot of building (so I exclude places like Phoenix, Boise and Austin where there is a crash). So even if the non-stupid cash buyers pull back, and the financing buyers are priced out, it leaves a slim supply and a slim demand. But the supply didn't suddenly explode, who will sell their sub-3% mortgaged homes, even to downgrade or upgrade to a new home, unless they absolutely have no choice. That leaves family events like deaths, marriages, and such.
That's why - unfortunately - there could be no crash this time. Just a long period of stagnation and low turnover.
Well redundancy is the other event which forces a sale. In a recession that is what happens and it becomes a spiral. It is quite possible to see a long period of stagnation though with no nominal price drops, just real price drops, as may well happen with stock prices too (see Japan in the 90s to today). The rest of the world is ahead in entering a downturn, but a recession and mass layoffs is coming in the US too, particularly in the tech sector which is massively overvalued and overpaying for talent right now.
I think what we can say is that the boom is over, and this will impact stocks, real estate and jobs for at least a couple of years till assets become more affordable again.
What can change this is a fed pivot on interest rates, which will happen at some point when things really break (bond market, stock market) or inflation comes down a bit, but not until then, so unlike previous downturns the fed doesn't have much ammunition here as they need to look serious on inflation.
My local anecdote - a few of my realtor friends said roughly 70% of all transactions in the last two years in Santa Barbara area have been cash deals. They also said currently those deals are all dried up. From what little research I've put into it, from the county assessors office it looks like 2.5k homes were sold last year in the area. Now think about this, we had an overwhelming number of people from LA and SF flee to Santa Barbara during the pandemic. How many of those people had temporarily won the stock option start-up lottery, ie. any tech bubble employee - zoom, pelaton, doordash, etc, or had a house that had spiked in value willing and was willing to swap homes. It doesn't take much when housing supply is at historic low and temporary bubble demand skyrocketed to throw the market all out of whack. Personally, I know at least 10 people that traded their zoom stock for all cash housing deals here in SB at the right time. Now that stock is worth 1/8 of what is was. I imagine that this scenario played out a few hundred times just in our little town. Extrapolate that nationwide, you can see what might have contributed to massive asset valuations that quite literally, don't make sense. In the long run, it shouldn't matter, however it will be fun to watch it all play out.
> Are cash buyers really 25% of the market in the US?
Not in the sense that they didn't finance part of the purchase, as I understand it. It just means the cash is already there from the point of view of the buyer.
You’re probably better off buying at 7% than at 2.75% if housing prices are adjusted. You get the house for less, more room for profit when you sell. Also, if you’re force to sell, it’s better to do this on a loan of 750k rather than 1m.
FWIW, those numbers are off because of escrow and taxes. 1.22MM house means AT LEAST 30k in property taxes a year, which mean's they'll end up at >~7.5k a payment, which means they'll need to buy a smaller house.
Property taxes in WA wouldn’t be much more than $13k if the home had an assessed value of $1.22M.
It also isn’t uncommon to see a big difference between the sale price and assessed value. One datapoint would be a $4M purchase that is only taxed at $2.2M the first year after the deal closed. At least in King County, the valuations do seem to “catch up more quickly” after a sale, so at +1y it might be $2.8M, at +2y it might be $3.3M, but to be paying >$30k here in taxes you’d need a >$3M assessed value home.
Seattle area property tax is usually around 0.75% of market value. Although, I would guess some are near or above 1% due to very recent declines in market value.
That seems low. My taxes were $9.40 per $1000 of assessed value in 2022. From searching around, I see an average 0.88% for King County (and apparently Pierce and Snohomish are higher).[1]
Yes, last time I checked, the numbers were still based on outlier price increases in 2020 and 2021. It may already be at 1% or even higher for many people.
> In Seattle, where the housing market is considered expensive, a 1.2m house only pays $7k in property taxes
Only if it has (a) an exemption or (b) an assessment well below market value. A typical house with a $1.2 million assessment will have paid over $10k in property taxes in 2022.
That would be option (b) in my comment. Washington State law requires assessed values to be 100% of "true and fair value"[1] despite the fact that they tend to lag market value.
Yeah this is very market dependent, especially with regard to whether there are state/local income taxes or the government depends mostly on property taxes. Here in NYC I’d expect to pay $10k or less in annual taxes for a property in that price range, however there are city and state income taxes plus apartment building building common charges.
It’s hard to compare this stuff apples to apples, but the one constant regardless of locality is that higher rates significantly reduce buying power for people relying on mortgages.
NJ and NY both have some pretty wide ranges of property taxes from town to town, county to county, not just because the percentages might be a bit different, but because their valuation systems are wildly confusing and inconsistent.
Where do you live in NJ? The average effective property tax rate is 2.470% of the home value. Property taxes would be ~$38k in Gloucester county(across the river from Philly).
People sitting on 2% mortgages are not going to move. There's a lot of housing inventory that's locked away now [1].
We're going to enter a lower supply, lower demand market. The prices might not move much.
[1] Maybe downsizing Boomers will balance this. I'm not aware of any measures of this trend, though. And a lot of Boomers just sold/downsized to take advantage of the high prices.
I see a future for a new financial product where the existing owner keeps paying the 2.5% motgage but is sells an option where he’s contractually required to sell it for the balance of the mortgage and rent the house for the current mortgage payment. In the old days there was a transferable loan, those don’t exist now but you need a new product to extract value out of an artificially low existing mortgage
Nearly my entire neighborhood consists of old Gen Xers and Boomers living in 2500-3500 sq ft houses, sometimes alone. It's insane. These people have decades to live in many cases. They are taking up these huge houses in smaller cities like mine so where are families going to go?
Not everyone is "fit" for living in dense cities with shared walls, noisy streets and crowded environs. There's a psychological component to being embedded with many people 24/7 that is under-appreciated here, when people fantasize about the ideal society of walkable cities, proportionally-sized dwellings, and density. The latter is for the single, the young and the adventurous. The old cranks like me grow out of it and long for a few thousand feet without noisy student neighbors playing music in the middle of the night or having parties.
Not to mention waiting in lines everywhere to go, and being forced to rub shoulders with lunatics when you need to commute for work or shopping.
At this stage of the game I'm ready for the 2500 sf house.
As one of those genx with a house larger than I need... yes.
The flip side of that is when I bought this hose from (looking it up) silent generation owner who was moving to a nursing home, there wasn't any other housing inventory in the price range and area and cost. Buying an old house and fixing it up over the years was much cheaper than buying a new house another half an hour out of town that costs 2x-3x more.
The buying a small house new house is still 2x-3x more than this old house would sell for.
Other than that this is a big house, there is no reason to sell it at this time. Additionally, the new development that is being built is targeting the most money that can be packed into a single lot... and... well, I don't want or need that.
If people want me to move out, build a nice 1-2 br 1.5 bath with a room for a home office on the quiet end of a street. I don't need a fancy kitchen. I don't need a place for fancy plates to show off in the dining room. I don't need a man cave with a bar or a three car garage... just something nice and sensible.
And yes, it is certainly a problem. Housing supply has been woefully under built for a decade or more, and that which is there is not targeting what remains of the middle aged middle class that sees a 30 year mortgage when they're 40 as absurd. The less expensive supply is often getting bought up by people speculating, as a rental property (either by a landlord or by a company).
Which brings us to "I've got a house, its paid off, going anywhere else reduces my net worth and gives me some debt that I'm unlikely going to be pay off before I retire - there is no reason to move at all."
Yeah, but some people switch to adjustable rate or balloon mortgages when they can't afford fixed. This is what I did when I bought my first house in 1988, with fixed rates over 10%.
I welcome a slump. I doubt it will be as big as I hope. My first home cost me ~2x my
new grad salary. Today homes cost 5+x a new grad salary. And it isn't because Millennials are buying up the market. Investors are buying up the market and making it impossible for run-of-the-mill families to own a home. I hope those investors lose a lot of money. It needs to hurt bad enough to settle into long term memory and discourage such behavior for generations to come.
I was house shopping this year but had to wait as I moved for a new job. In January I was quoted $>1M of buying power (without my partner). Now I’m quoted <$700k. I’m not buying anything soon.
My father is looking at moving to a new condo for retirement but was hesitant about HOA fees. This year he spent $50k to replace all the windows in his current home to prep for sale. That $50k in maintenance would cover $300mo in equivalent hoa fees, and that’s not considering every other maintenance cost he’s spent. The math just doesn’t justify home ownership from a financial perspective - if your home value isn’t skyrocketing.
I’ll be a renter for a while it seems. Maybe that’s ok.
As a side note it's often not worth maintenance in prep for sale, unless it takes it from uninhabitable to habitable (or more precisely unmortgageable to mortgageable).
The $50k you spend on windows would often only recoup $45k or even less, people vastly underestimate the costs of many things (but not all, foundation problems people always overestimate).
The saddest story I read about was someone who was told that putting $20k of new windows would let them sell for $40k more; and they did, and the buyer bulldozed the house to build a new one.
People often overestimate the universality of their tastes. Our sellers assumed that one of the first things we'd do would be a kitchen remodel, but we actually love the kitchen the way it is, and are just doing minor appliance replacements. Meanwhile what we actually did was new windows, solar, and a bunch of energy efficiency upgrades, which had been totally off their radar screens. If they'd gotten a different buyer it probably would've been a very different set of upgrades.
The value in home ownership is in reliability of housing. With a family, I seriously value knowing that I'm not likely to have my home pulled out from under me by the landlord for a higher and better use.
Ya, this is not like 2008 where interest rates were low AND housing prices collapsed, which actually did make houses more affordable. This happened because the recession was specifically about real estate and the bad mortgage loans blowing up. Since this is not happening now, even if housing prices stagnate or go down a bit, unless you are paying with cash, things are not going to be more affordable since rates are up.
Ya but being underwater doesn't really matter if you plan on living there for a long while. People will need a good reason to sell their house, like no longer being able to make payments due to job loss etc. (or they bought like 10 houses like in early 2000's...) So as long as the rest of the economy is okayish, I just see prices stagnating for a while. Also, inflation actually helps when you have a fixed mortgage...
You forget margin calls (mortgages with margin call provisions are illegal in California, and probably some other states in the US).
Basically, your mortgage says you have to maintain N% down. So, if the house price drops enough, you make a balloon payment or the bank forecloses, and sells the house at auction.
Once margin calls start triggering, there's an automatic sell off of whatever asset is impacted, causing more margin calls and a feedback loop.
90% of Britain's pension funds were hours away from being zeroed out by margin calls a few weeks ago. The Bank of England intervened.
It made for some great reading. This is why the UK gov't keeps walking back the mini-budget, and the IMF is making noises usually reserved for failing dictatorships.
I wish the "it's all supply side" meme would go away. With Western countries importing millions upon millions of people from other countries--and sometimes, implicitly importing them with wide-open borders like the US--the demand side is at least as much at fault. Western country birth rates are already near replacement levels; we shouldn't have to be building more housing in the first place!
The US is below replacement rate on 3rd generation+ families, and would experience an aging crisis like Japan if it were not for immigration. You're 'wide open borders' statement is just a dog whistle.
As someone currently sponsoring my immigrant spouse, I can first-hand tell you: the US immigration process is probably a lot more complicated, slow, burdensome, and frustrating than you think it is. It's expected to take 18 months and over $2,000 in various fees before my (currently undocumented) spouse will get a green card, and be able to begin working legally in this country.
> Millennials are in their prime family-building and house-buying years.
They have less earnings and savings than the previous generation as compared to the price of homes at the same time in their lives. While government intervention in the USA has adjusted the requirements to get a loan approved, it will not be enough to keep up with rising interest rates. Prices have to come down for millennials to make purchases. This will cause a "house-price" slump.
Traditional institutions, like home ownership, marriage, and religion, are fading in their appeal.
In the case of home ownership, the benefits depend quite a lot on the number of years the property will be owned. I'm not sure what the numbers are now, but when I bought and later sold my house, I determined that 6-7 years was the minimum duration that made home ownership better than just renting.
People change jobs more frequently now than in the past, and consequently they tend to move around more often. That makes investing in a home more risky, as it's really unclear if one will still want to be in that home/location in 5 years. Renting, by comparison, is less risky. It may be less economical over the long run, but not if you would find yourself moving every small few years.
Also, the remote work thing is not going to decrease; if anything, it will increase, reducing location pressure (and consequently reducing the value (or rate of increase in value) of homes in certain areas). That implies even more risk for homeowners in those areas, as they cannot rely on ever-increasing values.
"Traditional institutions, like home ownership, marriage, and religion, are fading in their appeal."
I think you might be reversing cause and effect. Millennials are less wealthy, and thus less able to purchase homes, get married. Traditional religious affiliation is declining, but it's debatable to what degree religious impulses have declined and to what degree they have simply found new forms of expression (e.g. into astrology, QAnon-style "theories", "General Artificial Intelligence", spiritualized ecology, etc.)
"People change jobs more frequently now than in the past, and consequently they tend to move around more often."
This is a false statement. The decline of residential mobility and its impact on labor market dynamism is a hot topic in U.S. economics research today.
> e.g. into astrology, QAnon-style "theories", "General Artificial Intelligence", spiritualized ecology, etc.
Most of all: College. Not only does it share a lot of the practical value that the church historically provided (community, fellowship, teaching), but notably it carries a similar fear-based belief system whereby there is a lot of social pressure to attend and it is accepted that if you don't attend you will face the scorn of the economic deity; the modern day version of "you will go to hell".
The specific "higher power" may have changed with time, but the human behaviour certainly hasn't.
My guess is that moves will go down even further over the coming years. Anyone who bought or refinanced a home over the past decade would need a hell of a good reason to sell and buy a new home in a new location with interest rates going up like they have.
I think that’s a good thing. Hard to build communities of anonymous transient people. Who cares if there is a park and cafe or you get to know your local representatives if you move every few years.
Home ownership is fading in appeal due to price, not because of social changes. Most people do not want to live in a concrete cave stacked side by side and underneath other concrete caves. They want space to go outside and enjoy themselves and do what they want to do. People change jobs more frequently but they usually stay in the same metropolitan area and if a job is worth enough to get them to move, the job usually comes with relocation benefits.
You seem to be equating "home ownership" with single-family detached homes, but that is not what the term means -- you can own an apartment flat as well, it's called a condo.
Maybe, but few people truly want to live in a condo. They're what you settle for unless you're old enough that you can't maintain a yard or regularly partake in outdoor activities anymore.
While I don't doubt the majority of homeowners prefer single-family homes, I've known a fair number of condo owners (and renters) over the years, and none of them were "settling" because they were too old for yard work. Some made that choice for financial reasons -- condos often cost less than roughly comparable SFHs even when you figure HOA fees in -- but many made that choice because they prefer urban or oceanside living. My former roommate of many years now lives in a loft condo in a dense urban area, and it is more or less his dream house. Currently I live in a SFH on over an acre of land in rural Florida, and while there are some lovely things about it, I would trade it for a condo in certain cities in a heartbeat. Not everyone places a high priority on being able to smoke a brisket in the back yard.
Yes, this is all anecdotal, but I can't help suspect that you're doing a bit of "this is how I feel, so surely it's the way everyone else feels". :)
Being that in the SFH neighborhood I live in there are a ton of homes that are serviced by lawn care companies, I don't think lawn maintenance is a determining factor.
It's about utilization of the space. If I want to smoke a brisket, I'm not getting far on an apartment balcony, and a pool party isn't the same when you just invite people to the shared one in the complex.
That's true, but not universally. There are places where one doesn't have to live in a concrete cube. Instead one can buy a home and have a space to go outside.
It sounds like true freedom is the life of an itinerant drifter - no ownership of anything and no social connections to tie you down; a bit ironic it would seem to me.
It may be, from a purely self-centered perspective (and I can appreciate that). However, hobos, drifters, and homeless generally force large externalities on the rest of us--i.e., it's not pure libertarianism.
Anecdotally, most of my older relatives spent 20+ years working at the same place. Meanwhile I’ve had 4 different employers in the last decade and don’t know many young folks in tech who have stayed with a company for 5+ years. (Why would you if you can only move up in position or salary by job hopping?)
In my anecdotal social circle, which skews older millennial with no tech representation outside of myself, I only know of one person who has jumped around to several jobs. A small handful have changed jobs once. The vast majority are where they started, 15+ years in now.
The boomers lived through 11% unemployment. It may not have been job hopping by choice.
Am I reading you right? You are saying that the vast majority of people in your social circle have been in the same job for 15+ years, and yet they are under age 50?
That would be astonishing, unless you are in some really unique industry.
Perhaps if it's one of the big consulting firms, maybe. They start right out of university and then follow a career track which can easily go 15 years to partner level. And for those willing and able to live that life, I imagine they don't change jobs as often as others.
Seems so. I don't see it being all that astonishing. Where else are you going to go? For normal people not in tech there aren't a thousand startups calling your name. There might be one or two competitors that aren't able to pay any more and would be a lateral move at best, which isn't worth the risk of hopping unless things are horrible where you are. A fair number work for government, so that's your only option save completely changing careers.
Table 2 pdf will also be of interest - Table 2. Percent of employed wage and salary workers 25 years and over who had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer by age and sex, selected years, 2012-2022
> In 1983, more than 1 worker in 3 aged 35 to 44 had been with the same employer 10 years or longer and almost the same ratio of workers 45 and older had worked for the same employer 20 years or more
> Among the principal findings:
> One worker in 6 has been with his or her employer for at least 15 years. Among workers aged 45 and over, nearly one-third have been with their current employer for 20 years or more.
> 2022, about 1 worker in 4 aged 35 to 44 has been with the same employer or longer, which is almost the same ratio as workers 45 to 54 working for the same employer for 20 years or more.
> Amount the principal findings:
> One worker in 18 has been with his or her employer for at least 15 years. Amount workers aged 45 to 45, less than one fifth has been with their current employer 20 years or more. This climbs to slightly more than one quarter for workers aged 55 or older.
Depends on the industry. For many people in IT, changing jobs every few years is pretty standard, as is relocating if a good enough opportunity pops up.
Agreed. Prices might fall relative to the wackiness of Covid peaks that were hit in the past year or so, but the long term trend will be for prices to outpace inflation unless a building spree hits due to demographic changes.
A bright light I'm seeing is that material costs have largely fallen back to pre-covid levels. There are a few bits that are expensive or hard to obtain (windows), and the labor market is still aging. But still, the cost to build in many areas has fallen dramatically.
This demand effect is certainly real, but is going to be weighed against the higher rates effect. A lot of the increase in prices was purely mathematically driven by the falling interest rates. The monthly payment if you get a mortgage has now doubled for most people. There's no way that's sustainable, especially as most first time buyers were already stretcing to their limit. All it takes is a belief that prices might fall to put off buyers a year or two and balance the demand side of the equation enough for prices to fall. House prices typically fall slowly though, as sellers are reluctant to sell at first and buyers just start waiting. Seems we are already seeing that impact on transaction volumes drying up.
Wait, we are in the aftermath of a recession? From where I am standing we are in the thick of it with a long road ahead of very uncomfortable economic pressures restricting personal upward mobility. What person is looking at a 20% increase in living costs, high interest rates, and houses that were priced for low interest and more money in people's pockets?
Reality is people can't afford the pre-recession prices, so they will rent and ride it out for a while longer which will put downward pressure on people trying to sell and the market will meet the demand that way.
Or institutional buyers will just continue absorbing housing stock as it goes on the market, and converting it into rental units. Squeezing more people out of ownership and into permanent rental.
I do wonder how many people can afford that vacation home without making use of Airbnb (or other vacation rental type system) to help with the payments...
If millennials were as wealthy as earlier generations at the same age, I think you'd be right. But millennials hold about half the fraction of national wealth that the baby boom generation did at the same age.
> in the aftermath of the Great Recession, not much new housing was built.
Notably due to the Great Recession aligning with record high (at the time) food commodity prices, which saw farmers outcompeting home buyers for development lands.
Food commodities have completely smashed those records over the past year or two and if that continues we will no doubt have farmers willing to bet big, which again will constrain housing development.
What will be interesting is if we are able to get our food supply issues under control. Food prices have been known to drop like a rock before.
I’m slightly surprised by this comment. The main story I see online is more like ‘the places that people [with reasonable amounts of money to spend on property] want to live are in or near the centres of large cities and land-use policies in those cities mean that it is very difficult for developers to build significant amounts of property, so it mostly doesn’t get built’. Obviously there aren’t farmers rushing to convert car-parks in San Francisco into wheat fields.
But perhaps what I’ve read is just wrong or biased towards the kind of wealthier youngish people who want to live near the centres of these big cities and can already afford to rent there.
I don't think they are at odds with each other. A city not being able to easily sprawl into the surrounding farmlands, as they have historically done, puts increased pressure in the city centre.
Maybe you prefer the city centre, but if you could build a new home in the suburbs for pennies on the dollar, it would be hard to pass up. But when building that suburban home costs just as much then there is little reason to compromise.
There is still a lot of sprawl happening, to be sure. But when competing for use, you're going to pay a lot more, which in turn drives up the cost in the city centre. Prior to 2007 when food commodities first started going nuts farmland was significantly less valuable.
Cities don't stand as islands. They exist within a much larger world.
People complain about what they can't get, not about what they are getting.
Around here we have something like 500+ new dwelling units in the last few years, and we're pretty small. Other areas all over the country have been building like mad.
I think near is the key. 5 years ago It used to be that the city core was cool now city cores are just a dumping ground of empty offices and societies rejects. We’re in another era of sprawl this time driven by for from home convenience
Sort of, the bigger problem in the US is that the US market is short something like 6 million houses due to zoning rules.
Volume is going to dry up significantly, and prices will go down a little bit - but there won't be a deluge of forced sellers like there were in 2008 because most people are on long-term fixed-rate loans. The majority of sellers will be divorcees and estates, as individuals chill in their 2.625% APR 30y fixed's - or own their homes outright.
Unlike 2008 we're not coming off a deluge of building, quite the opposite - and unlike 2008, most people don't have 5 houses on variable rate debt.
tl;dr: Prices will go down a bit, but the market is so short housing, it won't really matter.
Longer term anyone who buys at 7% APR will just refi down when rates drop - and probably cash-out refi at that.
Another big factor here is that the boomers are starting to die off. The oldest of that generation is 77 now and 80% of them are homeowners, so the next 20-30 years are going to see quite a lot of wealth (including homes) pass from boomers to their GenX and Millenial children.
Yes, more than a few will be lost that way. From what I've read though boomers as a whole want to stay out of assisted care facilities, probably because many of them saw their own parents rot in such places. My own parents are near the leading edge of the boomer cohort (they're 75) and it's a common feeling among their friends.
Also, the grim reality is that you have to live long enough to need assisted living. A life expectancy of 78 sounds good on paper, but by the time you get to your late 60s and early 70s people in your age bracket are dropping pretty quickly.
They may want to stay out of assisted care facilities, but late life decline makes independent living difficult to impossible for many.
They may try to put it off as long as possible, but it will catch up to them. And then it does not take long for the costs to consume their would-be estate.
And the irony is that it's the system their generation built for their parents.
Thanks for pointing out what almost no one else does. Younger generation out here with their beaks open hoping to catch that lucky break of passed down Boomer wealth, but I think you're right on. Healthcare will capture a huge amount of that wealth, part of it is being inflated away, and there's always the looming threat of increasing taxes or changes in laws to make sure Millenials aren't so lucky.
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I have never encountered an off-site like this, but if you have, how did it go?