> 2007 was the end of the destruction of the market (that time when housing
> prices doubled for no other reason than the money that left dotcom poured
> into housing.)
Overall home ownership increased from 64.0% to 68.4% from 1990 to 2007.
During that time the population also increased from 250m to 300m.
Ostensibly, around 47m new home owners were added to the list during that
time. Going from 160m owners to 205m owners, or adding a new 28%.
During the same period 27m new housing units were completed, with 21m being
single family homes. I would assume this imbalance would impact pricing,
and there were plenty of other ventures for bummed out dotcom money to pour
into right around 2004.
Total ownership continued to fall until 2016. New single family home
construction rate has only recovered to about 1995 levels. The current
population is now 330m. I contend this suggests it's _still_ going.
> Fact is, after people are used to paying more, there's a new baseline and
> a new level of profit expected
If you take the chart of average home sale prices over the past 45 years,
you see mostly linear growth. 2007 was a bubble in pricing, seeing around
an 18% higher price than this trend line. The prices stabilize back to the
trend from 2010 until 2013 again, since then, prices have been about 10%
above trend until 2021 where they rocketed back up to 18% above the half
century trend.
There's been more than one mode impacting price, and whatever it is, it's
happening again. Probably worse, because we don't have any corresponding
movement in new home construction with this "bubble."
> Multiply that by orders of magnitude for real, wealthy property owners.
Then divide it by all the people who didn't do that, which I'm estimating
to be of at least a similar if not slightly greater order of magnitude. I
know quite a few of these people. Some who bought into the irrational
exuberance as an opportunity to just remodel the home they've lived in for
more than a decade. They don't live there now. The smart ones managed
to just barely break even.
> Then to add insult to injury, when a bunch of leveraged people lost their
> shirts on property derivatives, we bailed them out, paying twice.
Bailing the American people out is how it was sold. This is not a bad idea
if that's what they actually did. It would probably have a little more
sticking power if they bothered to put more than a token banker or two in
jail for minor indiscretions during the first pump and dump of housing
turned commodity.