Live data from Hacker News

1-Euro Houses

1eurohouses.com

101–110 of 196 posts

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#101
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's an old joke that has two economists coming across a $20 bill on the sidewalk, which goes: > The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!" > Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."

I swear I've seen this pasted in 10+ times over the years on HN and this is probably the most directly relevant of them all.

I wish pennies would listen to the market and just disappear in a poof of logic

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#102
post #81
post #5

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above…

Sometimes I wish that people could short sell homes ...

There are shortable futures contracts tied to US housing price indexes[1], but they're highly illiquid (rarely trade, and have wide bid/ask spreads). This is probably related to the difficulty of hedging, since as another poster points out housing is not fungible, and to the very high transaction costs involved in buying or selling the underlying.

[1] https://www.homepricefutures.com/

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that the pandemic and impending economic collapse will change that. Remember when the 2008 crisis hit, no one was buying but no one was renting either. And a lot of banks with real estate on their books just let it sit there (where it sits today). Once a the credit default domino chain starts to fall, people and organization will need to get liquid. The first stage will see some people jump in on pent-u…

> no one was buying but no one was renting either. As someone who was in eighth grade at the time, can you clarify what you mean by this? Every person either 1) buys property, 2) rents property, 3) goes homeless, or 4) dies. There aren't really any other choices.

Some additional options: staying with your parents; inheriting the property; marrying someone who owns a property.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that the pandemic and impending economic collapse will change that. Remember when the 2008 crisis hit, no one was buying but no one was renting either. And a lot of banks with real estate on their books just let it sit there (where it sits today). Once a the credit default domino chain starts to fall, people and organization will need to get liquid. The first stage will see some people jump in on pent-u…

> no one was buying but no one was renting either. As someone who was in eighth grade at the time, can you clarify what you mean by this? Every person either 1) buys property, 2) rents property, 3) goes homeless, or 4) dies. There aren't really any other choices.

You can share so less people rent or going back to your parents place (common in Spain for example, in where families use to live in the same city)

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#105
post #5

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above…

This is super interesting, because the land registry in Barcelona reflects something like 25% of market value today for cadastral value, and was even less before their recent adjustment (+50% in my case) a couple years ago.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#106
post #17

I looked into this pretty extensively when Italy announced it and like most government initiatives there it's a borderline scam and was done for the PR not because it makes sense. Each of these houses requires extensive renovation work, usually of the type that can only be performed by an expensive specialized contractor. Besides the expected costs for this work (Which will be at least 20k Euros up to 200k or more) y…

How's that old saying goes? If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#107
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wish that people could short sell homes ...

There are shortable futures contracts tied to US housing price indexes[1], but they're highly illiquid (rarely trade, and have wide bid/ask spreads). This is probably related to the difficulty of hedging, since as another poster points out housing is not fungible, and to the very high transaction costs involved in buying or selling the underlying. [1] https://www.homepricefutures.com/

Yeah I know about those. Robert Shiller was behind this project, in his mind many mortgages should be bundled with a put option on such an index. I agree. Needles to say his idea didn't catch on.

Here I was thinking about shorting specific homes, those for which one of the parent comments implied that their value is substantially lower than the current asking prices. It's a very futuristic idea, though not entirely impossible. If you're long on something then lending that thing out to a short seller is profitable because he has to pay you the lending fees (usually up to a few % per year).

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#108
post #83
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that spe…

This is known as the Poor Widow fallacy. edit: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html edit: A solution to this problem is to allow seniors to defer payment of the land value tax until the next purchase of the land, at which point the next buyer will receive the deferred tax burden.

Copying your URL here and adding the scheme so it renders as a link:

https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#109
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks, it does. Why is the east side cheaper? I mean, I know it was occupied by the Soviet Union back in the day, but why is it still cheaper there now?

Lots of free space! Look at how relatively sparsely populated the area around Berlin is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pop_dens... Germany has a very low fertility rate & even immigration isn't enough to make the population grow more than very slowly so if a lot of people moved westwards and into the cities it means a lot of people moved out of the east and the country side. Also almost the enti…

Berlin winters ... mild?

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#110
I live in Italy and i've been hunting a 1Euro deal house since long. I've seen dozen in the last 4-5 years. IT DOESN'T WORTH the deal! Long story short: the property cost nothing but the entire property is very narrow, glued to other houses. But the huge disadvantage is the (compulsory investment!) cost of renovation here in Italy: at least 50,000 euros, depending on size. Could go up to 150,000. All of the properties are almost decayed, completely decrepit state. Inhabitable! Personally, we decided to build our wooden small house (villetta di campagna) with less than 50,000.
Post reply on HN