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.
1-Euro Houses
101–110 of 196 posts
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#102Im +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 ...
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#103Earlier 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.
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#104Earlier 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.
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#105Im +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…
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#106I 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…
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#107Earlier 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/
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
#108Earlier 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.
https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html
Re: 1-Euro Houses
#109Earlier 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…