In large cities across the US (and probably most of the world), there is some very large scale foreign speculation in the housing market going on. This is leading to rising rents and rising home prices. In Seattle, for example, many (newly) wealthy Chinese people are buying houses purely for investment purposes. I know some of them. One of them has purchased 10 houses, and lives in only one of them (when they are in…
Disagree. It costs much more to build a house or apartment than it did 50 years ago. This is primarily because of changes in city requirement to make the houses safer. I recently had a house burn down in a neighborhood with numerous $150k houses. Cost to rebuild a similar structure was over $200k. I got three bids and every contractor told me the cost was much higher than nearby existing properties because legally, t…
My home insurance company made this very clear when I started a policy with them - they discussed the price of the house (e.g. in tax roll estimates of "land improvement") vs their estimated replacement cost. Even with new requirements though, no one talks about the productivity improvements in construction - from faster to put up materials, to the abundance of various tools .. is it really regulations or a form of cost disease...