I stayed at an Airbnb recently And I was curious what the actual value of it was so I looked it up on Zillow. Sold in 2015 for 350k, sold again in 2022 for $750k, now listed for sale 1.2 million. It’s a cabin in North Carolina, literally nothing special. I remember back before 2020 there was tons of mountain and cabins and homes and stuff like that anywhere from 2:50 to 500K. Now you won’t find a single one less than 800k…
Regular homes are just as bad. I’m seeing homes in my area that sold for around $200 to 300K in 2019, now they are 500k and above. I don’t understand how this makes any sense? Salaries were not doubled, but somehow the price of all homes are now twice as much. Is this some sort of cost fixing scheme by the real estate industry to just drive up the price of homes and double them or something? Because it doesn’t really make sense to me I guess.
My guess is that as the need for housing has increased (population growth, short term rentals taking up supply, etc), we haven’t been building the right kind of homes to fill the void.
Nobody is out there using land to build “starter homes”. It’s either large, expensive houses or apartment complexes, so the demand for home ownership is high, but the ones available to buy aren’t cheap.
It would be like if nobody made affordable cars, so most drivers were stuck either leasing or saving up for a Lamborghini. (Hyperbole, but you get the idea)