I know I’m supposed to want it to keep going up as a wealth generator or whatever.
But like… I wouldn’t be able to afford the monthly payments if I bought my house right now and it’s scary. Also none of my friends are buying homes, none of them are even renting full places. Just like renting rooms.
So what are your feelings home owners of lemmy?
(German)Homeowner and (small time) landlord here: Yes. And I look forward to it. We bought an old house (think 1940ies) a while back and did renovate it. While it was expensive the absurd thing wasn’t actually the price but the price for craftsman and material. The former already crashed heavily here (sadly not for the ones I need).
I rent out three apartments in the same house I live in. We have an average rent index here and I stick to it (even though I could easily get more as we don’t include extras in our calculations that we normally could add to get more rent - and with that market we easily could get more.
The way we financed the house is based on the premise that the market will crash - it is not a regular investment in the sense that we will come out with a net positive. It is a way to make sure that we don’t need to rent anymore (which is hell at times) and that we do have a place where we must not worry about rent when we are old. If the kids do inherit something,nice,but not a must.
We initially didn’t even want something to rent out, but the perfect house was one with more than one apartment. So we said why not.
So why do I want the market to crash? Renting is absurd these days. Craftsman prices are insane. Both of these problems can only be solved once the market has crashed - which means either we have much less people (likely to happen,but late) or first pick up building subsidized apartments on a much larger scale (which makes the later problem much bigger). But if we don’t do something soon it will make basic services (nursing is a good example) even unobtainable as people in these jobs won’t be able to afford their rent in the more expensive regions. This will affect everyone.
I am gainfully employed but keep an eye on what’s available in the US just to see what opportunities are out there. I started seeing some insane salaries and so checked the offers out. Five minutes of research shows that even with the highest salary , there is literally no place to live. Neither rent nor purchase. Because it’s a service like Indeed, I don’t see a way to contact the job poster directly and see if they are even aware this is an issue. Many of the postings are around one month old.
You mentioned nursing, here in the US, hospitals have been pared back to mostly large urban areas. This caused my brain to hurt.
Cheers and luck, I hope y’all don’t end up renting in old age!
Funnily enough with nursing we are currently seeing the reverse effect now. Nursing generally isn’t well paid here and due to public insurance/collective agreements we don’t see that much variance in nursing wages - while rent does vary considerably between various locations.
This led to hospitals in the big cities (Munich and Hamburg especially) being disadvantaged in the current nursing crisis and patient sometimes have to be transported to smaller hospitals far away from their home. We saw cases last fall where critically ill children have been transported to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Ingolstadt, Nürnberg or even Austria from Munich due to the lack of PICU nurses there. The opposite was the case for the last decades.