201–210 of 553 posts
I’ve been following these prices closely for most of the year and what’s striking to me is just how wrong nearly all the industry experts were throughout the year. I don’t recall reading a single opinion that was anything other than “prices will remain very high for the foreseeable future.”
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I would wait. I'm an licensed inactive General Contractor. If 14 months ago, they were building them for $450,000, I'd wait. I'd shop around for another contractor too. A young guy starting out, might save you a lot. (There's no way to verify he knows what he's doing though.) If you are some what handy, it's not that difficult to owner build your own house. That is if you get the blueprints past the town's council. G…
Why does the USA, The Land of the Free and The Land of Opportunity, have so much bureaucracy? Look, I know fire codes are important, and you don't want a building to crumble in around you, but... Seems the building codes in the US are unnecessarily strict. Is it power hungry bureaucrats or exploitation from contractors that has lead to it? And how can the people be given more liberty to build the way they want?
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Unconventional, a St Louis entrepreneur built a container house. Few things to go wrong there.
Unfortunately a container house will always end up both more expensive and worse than a traditionally built house. Containers are fantastic as containers but terrible for making a house with. As soon as you start cutting holes in them they lose a great deal of their structural strength which is their main advantage. Terrible to insulate and for condensation as well. The exception is if you’re happy with a single cont…
I have a friend who plans on building a container house, and who is convinced that it will be much cheaper than a traditional house. Note that we live in Europe, where homes are build from stone and concrete, not wood and cardboard.
I don't think prices are "cratering" so much as just returning to normal rather than price gouging. Now if I could just buy a GPU for a normal price...
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Low interest rates, QE, stimulus, and rocketing stock prices facilitated the hot real estate market as much as proximate covid policies. You are correct to guess there is a substantial discussion that you're ignorant of.
Low interest rates don't increase inflation do they? And rocketing stock prices are definitely not a part of inflation. QE and stimulus can certainly contribute , but "as much" is a pretty big overstatement. If anyone thinks inflation was a notable fraction of the price quadrupling, they're being ridiculous. Even a huge amount of inflation would only be 2-4% of the lumber price increase.
Decrease in interest rate increases money supply (increase in lending -> new deposits).
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Common practice in construction industry is to overcommit to too many projects, then raise prices until the most cost-conscious customers drop out. Now you’re only left with the customers willing to pay the highest prices. It’s not really about lumber prices. It’s about finding the highest construction prices that the market will bear. Can’t find the limit until you push so hard that some customers start dropping out…
Ah, another type of market assholery. Price discovery mechanism that's free for the builders, but very expensive for the would-be customers. About as nice as grading on a curve. I wonder if there's a space for business for an intermediary who would take on multiple builders for your single home, wait for them to do their price discovery dance, and then drop every one of them except for the cheapest one. Disrupting sc…
"If high prices held you back from building, you are in luck, as the tables have now turned" Except... many builders will find some other reason/excuse where prices are high to keep prices high. We were looking at building a house - talked to builder last November and... looking at $470-$480k range (ballpark estimate). Lumber was going higher, but we'd reduced the house plan size. Lumber kept going up... and up... Th…
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Yep. One of the ways reporters mislead people while remaining factually correct. Then they blame factually incorrect news as destroying society while they're just doing the same thing more tactfully.
"factually incorrect news" is not the same thing as "fake news". Fake news is like a fake Rollex. The correctness of the time on the dial isn't the thing that makes it fake. Fake news is fraud without the monetary connotation. If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of…
Sure, buying the genuine watch supports the IP holders and gives you bragging rights, but both the genuine and the fake are bad choices when you're looking for a high-quality, durable and precise watch.
> There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with.
By this standard, regular news would be fake news too. You don't get manipulative language in the article when someone is trying to "get it right" - it only shows up when someone is trying to get it wrong, on purpose.
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[0] - I.e. what computing hardware and home appliance vendors do all the time.