From NYT, shocking, shocking news: you may have to stop looking at your house as a guaranteed cash cow.
“There is no iron law that real estate must appreciate,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate site Zillow. “All those theories advanced during the boom about why housing is special — that more people are choosing to spend more on housing, that more people are moving to the coasts, that we were running out of usable land — didn’t hold up.”
Instead, Mr. Humphries and other economists say, housing values will only keep up with inflation. A home will return the money an owner puts in each month, but will not multiply the investment.
You may recognize Zillow as being the company that was all too happy to tell you how much your home’s value had appreciated over three months during the boom years, and now gleefully sends you emails showing you how much your home is no longer worth. Neither of these numbers, of course, was ever worth the price of sending the email, but that didn’t stop homeowners from gobbling up the unwarranted (and unfounded) pricing news and having unrealistic expectations as to the value of their home.
This is, of course, a great comfort to the (estimated) 99.9% of Americans who have already lost their homes and are now living in the Sub-Zero refrigerator boxes in which those homes’ refrigerators shipped. Even if they hadn’t defaulted on their mortgages, their completely rational dreams of someday selling their McMansions for ten times the original value (to whom, we’ve never been quite sure) were never going to play out. At least now they’re only having to clean up five square feet of cardboard instead of five thousand square feet of garish suburban blight, so there’s that.
It has long been argued that housing, and real estate in general, were always going to appreciate because land is the one thing they’re not making more of. The one thing, except for minerals, fossil fuels, episodes of LOST, or quality children’s cartoons. So that logic is flawed right from the start. Also, it’s slightly unreasonable to expect housing prices to consistently outpace inflation when housing prices are one of the key measures of what inflation is in the first place. Real estate prices rising faster than inflation was only the rule following WWII anyway, and even then they were increasing only 1 percentage point or so more than inflation. Well, until the mid-90s and the ten years after that, when things got zany and grew 4 percent above inflation until they didn’t.
But it’s been a few years, the sting of home prices falling like a fat kid’s pants when his belt breaks has worn off, and we’ve all come to accept the new normal, right?
In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities — Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee — once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.
Jesus. We don’t even deserve a functioning economy, we really don’t.
Of course, there are still a few professional Pollyannas out there, even today.
Bob Walters, chief economist of the online mortgage firm Quicken, acknowledges that the recent collapse will create a “mind scar” just as the Great Depression did. But he argues that housing remains unique.
“You have to live somewhere,” he said. “In three or four years, people will resume a normal course, and home values will continue to increase.”
You do have to live somewhere, unless you just walk the earth, like Caine from Kung Fu. But you don’t have to own. And nationally, there are more houses standing vacant than there are people to live in them. Barring a severe increase in Americans or a very specific smiting that wipes out the oversupply of housing, it’s hard to imagine demand catching up to supply anytime soon.
Even if it does, there are a couple of problems with real estate bubbles. One is, as Bob said, you have to live somewhere. So you’ve got this house that you bought for a hundred fifty grand, suddenly you can sell it for three hundred grand. Great, a hundred fifty grand in your pocket…except you have to buy another house to live in, and unless you’re moving to a different housing market, you’ve got to put that hundred fifty grand right back into a house whose owners are also selling for a hefty profit. All you’ve experienced there is hyperinflation – it’s functionally no different than what Zimbabwe is experiencing with their currency. You’re not a millionaire when it costs a million bucks to buy a loaf of bread.
The second problem is even more basic. So much of the bubble was based on new construction: neighborhoods popping up left and right with hastily-built homes whose builders were more interested in quantity than quality. Simply put: new houses, by and large, are crap. They were often built with shortcuts, lower-grade components, cheap appliances bought in bulk, and inspected briefly if at all. A new house is pretty sweet: nothing in it has ever been used, everything has its full lifespan ahead of it, it’s just a world of possibilities. But then things start to break, wear out, require maintenance, and suddenly that sparkling American dream is just another used-up shanty that needs thousands of dollars of work just to be livable by the next owner. Somehow a home with mold problems, a leaky roof, cracked drywall, plumbing issues, or needing a new HVAC system is supposed to be worth more than what you paid for it a couple of years ago? Not just more, but hundreds of thousands of dollars more? Yeah, it’s no wonder that roller coaster ended like the beginning of Final Destination 2.
