I’m being inundated by email, phone, and text message offers to get me a great price for my house. Which I’m not selling. I haven’t seen a “for sale” sign on a house in months. If there were a better sign of an exploding inflation, I fail to see what it could be.
5 responses to “Inundated”
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The houses here have been selling for ridiculous prices, like 2-3x what they were before 2020. It’s such a rip-off for new homebuyers. And for those of us not selling, new estimated (read: inflated) prices mean we end up paying higher property taxes.
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Yeah. We are moving for a new job in a couple months, and have been looking for a house. I hate renting so much. But it looks very much like we are probably going to end up leasing a mobile home for a year, to wait for the inevitable real-estate crash, so that we can (hopefully) buy a house at a sane price. Every time we find one that looks decent and the asking price is in line with the value of the house in 2019 (plus inflation and all) and is in our price range… we get massively outbid on it. We recently looked at a reasonably-priced house in a decent neighborhood, that had nothing catastrophically wrong with it (possibly a roof leak by the chimney, carpets needed to be ripped out, and still crammed with the last occupant’s heaps of junk). The house sold for $65k above an asking price of $100k.
The current real-estate market is unsustainable. And IMO when you get to the point where every homeowner is getting repeat spam phone calls offering to buy their house/land (my parents and my sister have complained about these)… we’ve got to be near the bursting point.
But I understand the scramble to turn your cash into hard assets. What was inflation over the last year? 8.5% seems to be just what the fedgov is admitting to. It’s worse than that. Over 13% if you use the CPI from 1970 (before they took fuel and housing off the list of determinants). Who gives a crap if you can get a smartphone cheaper than ever, when filling your gas tank makes you cry and you have to work three jobs to afford a house?
It feels like running up a sand dune. We are saving as much money as we can for a downpayment, but the interest we earn on it is a joke, and by the time our next lease is up, it’s gonna be worth what? 20% less? Meanwhile Blackrock and its corporate partners are using Fed play-money to buy up all the available housing in our price range, by bidding up the price until it’s out of our reach. My understanding is poor here, but I assume the reason for this is not some nefarious plan to own everything and push more people out of all possibility of home ownership (but hey, I could be wrong). I reckon the idea is to try and remediate/hide some of the insane money-printing and resulting inflation by sinking a bunch of that imaginary cash into real estate. Which means they will fight hard to keep that market inflated, and protect the miscreants from blowback (ala 2008 bailouts).
Even Slate seems to understand part of the problem here:
https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.htmlThe houses those creeps are buying up are exactly the ones we might be able to afford if they’d kept their buckets of monopoly money out of the market. Just finished filling out the application for the mobile-home park. Fingers crossed they have an opening when we’re ready to move…
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In the meantime, your job will still snip off part of your income to play the stock market with. First time I’ve ever seen 401k contributions on a W-2 before. That was like discovering we were paying $10/mo for the &%$ streetlight in front of the house that was keeping us awake at night, and that we couldn’t afford blackout curtains for. They are literally taking money that we earned, to *gamble with. For our own good. How do we opt out? Do we get a say in it?
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Most likely due to people working from home. This increases total demand for housing since bigger houses are needed with home offices. Expect high prices until more houses are built, which takes a while.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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