And my best friend just doubled his money on his starter home. The bank cut him a $125,000 check I saw it. Less than 10 years. He has $125,000 in a new checking account with no idea what to do with it. After putting an $80,000 down payment on a new house.
His experience derived from an abnormal housing market with last years run up just as you experienced an abnormal housing market.
If you bought in any American city at the height of the bubble in 2007 and sold in 5 years I have a very hard time believing you would have been better off renting for those 5 years.
Abnormal is the key. There are two ways to value a house - it's sale value and it's rental value. If the total cost of owning is greatly different to the total cost of rentng then the cheaper one is a no-brainer unless you have other reasons.
There's a fair few things to take into account when calculating the total costs which people normaly get wrong but if it aint obvious then it probably doens't matter much and your speculating if you're thinking of profiting.
The other thing when buying is to be very careful about long term issues like flooding risk. And many areas are at a higher risk of become uninhabitable.
For example, I'd avoid buying in places like Las vegas like the plague unless it's so cheap it dont matter. Sure maybe they will find solutions to the 'being a hell hole desert' issue during global warming but then again they may well not.
If you bought in any American city at the height of the bubble in 2007 and sold in 5 years I have a very hard time believing you would have been better off renting for those 5 years.
I bought in Milwaukee in late 2006 and got crushed. It fell 50% and took until 2018 to get back to what I paid for it.
We bought another house in 2014 instead of paying for private high school, and I rented the extra house out for those 4 years.
The rent was exactly the mortgage payment so any additional expenses came off the bottom line, but it was better than taking a huge bath on the sale.
Yes, so many Canadians made out like bandits when the 2007 collapse happened.
AZ is many Cdn's winter escape and they saw neighbours repo'd homes selling for 40%-60% of highs, in many cases. I personally know many Cdn's who bought 2-3 more homes in that crash only to flip them for huge profits a few years later.
AZ gov't actually celebrated and officially thanked Cdn's for providing much needed 'Liquidity' to a market that had not enough buyers and thus prices just kept plummeting and plummeting.
That said the US gov't really dropped the ball by giving all the bail out to the big banks and private companies like Steve Manuchin's company to buy up the real estate instead of doing more to help people stay in their homes.
Yea man you’re right I looked at a few markets. The ones with bubbles took a looooong time to come back. Then you have places like Dallas that are hockey sticks.
Where I’m from in the northeast we didn’t have a bubble and I’m the town I grew up in prices have trended steadily upwards for at least 30 years.
Yea renting seems to make a lot of sense without a long term plan, family close, roots etc
I don’t think you’d argue against the fact that homeownership has been a reliable path to build wealth for generations of Americans and Canadians, millions upon millions of people ending up better off than their parents.
During the moratorium period, landlords don't have to pay any taxes and are exempt from any maintainence of their units except what is necessary to maintain minimal health and safety standards.
People have to pay their rent. If they need help doing so then the government provide housing benefit so that they can - at least until they have time to downsize if circumstances have changed permenently. There are also housing officers who can check rents are not excessive. And build up the stock of decent quality council housing.
Maybe a bit of nostalgia but it still seems like a very good idea.
People have to pay their rent. If they need help doing so then the government provide housing benefit so that they can - at least until they have time to downsize if circumstances have changed permenently.
I like it!
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There are also housing officers who can check rents are not excessive. And build up the stock of decent quality council housing.
You're starting to lose me, here. What is excessive rent, and who decides?
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Maybe a bit of nostalgia but it still seems like a very good idea.
You're starting to lose me, here. What is excessive rent, and who decides?
Don't know what the USA equilivent would be called but in the UK, the local council used to employ housing offcers who could visit properties if requested by tenants and see if rents were fair - presumably compared to the norm*.
The other reason they are needed is to prevent abuse of housing benefit system by some landlords charging the government above the market rent. Can't just pay anything they ask for.
*made use of them as a student. If you want stories of an unbelievable shithole then please ask
Yea I don’t like the sound of government fairness inspectors let looses on the entire housing market.
We have a federal program called Section 8. It does something like charge a low income person 30% of their take home pay then covers the rest of their rent. That program does have a government inspector that sets the rent. It’s not all bad but the program has a few issues
No security deposit. If they **** up your unit you know they have no money to pay to fix it, and they gave you no deposit.
Inspections. As long as you have one of these tenants the government inspector comes back every year to tell you **** to fix.
Attracting market tenants. Regular renters ask ‘do you have section 8 tenants here?’ When you say yes they look somewhere else. There’s a stigma attached to section 8 tenants, earned or not, that market renters do not want to live with them. An anecdote to that point
My friend from my previous job lives in low income housing. Its like 20 duplexes in its own little neighborhood. It’s an absolute dump. When you see it in the daytime you can see the few families that put in an effort to their yard, and their work is swallowed up but their neighbors’ filth. He lives in an otherwise pristine well off northeastern suburb and it’s like the town imported a beat down section of eastern Kentucky. He has said to me ‘I hate that my sons have to look around at this every morning.’
Planting a place like that in every town is not the solution. What the solution is I don’t know.
One solution set up a bank that gives no down payment mortgages to poor people. The bank doesn’t have a profit motive but a social mission. Then make affordable units homes people can own. Then section 8 becomes mortgage assistance.
I mean if i could snap my fingers and replace the Heath insurance industry with the government I would. I think if you were designing a housing system from scratch you need the government to take care of the least fortunate. Like with most things IMO.
Yeah, your post boils down to, "This is why we can't have nice things."
It's why nobody wants to build low income housing. All the rich dudes from the suburbs who post their white guilt on 2p2 don't grasp the fact that you cannot save people from themselves.
We aren't allowed to tell people we won't accept rent assistance any more, but we're still allowed to enforce our screening criteria, which is basically the same thing as not accepting rent assistance tenants.
Some landlords specialize in it. Our preservation division handles cleaning and turnovers for a few such operators in Milwaukee, and on average the cleaning bill for a low income unit is at least twice as high as would be typical. Over time, the units have been simplified and standardized because of how consistently they suffer damage. You won't find any "character" in low income housing.
I always feel terrible for out of state individual investors who call me for a turnover of an investment property they purchased and rehabbed without knowing the neighborhoods and end up paying more than half a year worth of rent in repairs to get it back into rent-ready condition. The outgoing tenant is probably judgment-proof so they just have to eat it.
Say you have a married couple with two young kids. The wife stays home to take care of one of the kids with special needs. The husband has a decent paying blue collar job that supports the family and he drops dead at 37 with no life insurance.
What is that mother supposed to do? The funeral wiped out all savings. The waitlist for section 8 is years long. Seriously, what are they supposed to do? Anyone who’s been to a bad neighborhood in a city knows the answer is not dedicated low income complexes.
She’s got to have somewhere to go other than the market with money she doesn’t have. My friend had an immediate unexpected housing need, his family was suddenly homeless. He didn’t have first, he didn’t have last, and he couldn’t afford market rent. He called his state senator and she had them in an income based place within 2 days. That’s not a scalable solution.
Inso if that happened in one of your units in Milwaukee, the breadwinner dies and the family has to leave, what are they supposed to do?
It’s not often that a president tries to defend his policies by saying, in effect: Well, look, this is probably unconstitutional, but not definitely unconstitutional, so we thought, why not?
That being approximately Joe Biden’s answer when he was questioned about the legality of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest eviction moratorium.
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I’m old enough to remember when it was a bad thing for presidents to knowingly and blatantly violate their oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. I’m even old enough to remember a time — lo these seven months ago! — when the left responded to such maneuvers with horror, rather than egging them on.
Inso if that happened in one of your units in Milwaukee, the breadwinner dies and the family has to leave, what are they supposed to do?
Pay the rent or leave.
It's unclear what the actual question is here. Bad things happen in life. It's not the job of private property owners to hand out free houses.
How is this any different than if the person simply lost their job? Why do they have to die? To make me feel bad and let them stay for free?
If this happened in one of our units we'd drag our feet on the process and wait to see if family stepped in to help. But we're still sending out the required notices on the path to removing the tenant.
I know they have to leave your unit. I’m asking as far as public policy goes what kind of support you think a family in that situation should get. It’s a shitty country we have if that family goes to live in their car imo.
