I hope this is contagious.
Please let it leap west. I’m really hoping housing becomes affordable again here in the Netherlands
As someone who owns my own home, let me just say…me too. I don’t care if my house value goes to zero. I still have a house. I don’t know how anyone in the middle class can get into house ownership without crippling debt.
The only ones who should cry are the home-hoarding investors and landlords. Fuck em.
Good, fuck everyone.
I hope this comment can start being applied to more news stories
Good. Hopefully this helps the working class to finally own their own homes en masse for the first time in a generation.
I’m not holding my breath though. Capitalists will find a way to crush the workers under their boot as always.
Good. Hopefully this helps the working class to finally own their own homes en masse for the first time in a generation.
Nothing was solved regarding home supply. In fact, the opposite happened. No new construction is ongoing.
Once their economy recovers, prices will again rise.
Is it just a result of rising interest rates? Or was there another catalyst, not covered by the article? Did the supply of housing increase? What are the current rates of immigration?
My opinion is that it’s investors.
Plenty of people out there buy houses for cash, spruce them up, and sell them for profit to extract some of the equity inherent in real property. Over time, they collectively push up the perceived value by force, and occasionally, the people who are the ultimate source of that equity, the ones looking to buy a permanent home, will stop buying.
There’s been a chunk of time recently, a decade or maybe more, where those permanent home seekers, the true source of the equity, haven’t been buying property. COVID exasperated the issue, because the flippers went fucking crazy for a couple years and inflated the amount of non-homes. Now they want their equity back out, but nobody who wants an actual home is looking to buy one because there isn’t enough value for them.
So prices have to come down before the actual source of equity starts buying again. The bubble has to deflate some.
Again, the entirety of this statement is simply my personal opinion, so grain of salt, but this is what pure logic and critical thinking suggests is the true mechanism :)
If interest rates went up, crippling demand for new housing, this is a temporary “burst” at best. Their economy is in the trash can right now, and that means demand is artificially low.
The second their economy rebounds they’ll be back in the same situation.
I have lived in Germany for 7 years. I hold a STEM master‘s degree and was working an industry job that paid market rate salaries. With 50k€ in savings I was still denied mortgages because 50k was just barely covering the additional purchase costs (such as realtor and notary fees).
For a modest condo with a small garden in a small-ish city in central Germany I would’ve had to work and pay the mortgage until I retired, because the average house was 600k EUR. And most of the properties sold at that price still needed significant renovations.
If that is not f^cking crazy, then I don’t know what is.
Yeah the salaries in Europe do not jive at all with the housing prices in major metros. At least in the US a STEM job is probably gonna pay north of 6 figures if you’re in a decent metro area. I live in the EU now and if I switched from freelancing for American clients to working a full time job here I would be taking a major pay cut to do it. The pay is god awful but rent is fairly comparable to where I used to live on the US west coast.
I don’t think housing will ever be cheap again. It’s been too over-consolidated and the game of corporate monopoly has already started. Unless we get strong regulations about how much housing property a person or company can own, we are stuck high housing prices.
