My salary didn’t change at all, but homes went up 82%. The money I saved for a down payment and my salary no longer are good enough for this home and many others. This ain’t even a “good” home either. It was a 200k meh average ok home before. Now it’s simply unaffordable
Yeah that was me too… I FINALLY got to the point where I could realistically start looking, got the pre-approval and everything just after COVID started… People had already starting WFH and moving away from where they worked and investment companies kept buying and now I’m still living in someone else’s garage because prices went through the roof pretty much as I was looking…
Of course once you mention WFH everyone gets defensive and claims this was a trend, but those charts are the same everywhere. Houses in 2018-19 were often less than half of what they cost now…
WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.
This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.
Maybe I’m just ignorant, but in a just world that should have never been allowed to happen… I’m sure our politicians had nothingggg to do with that “oversight.” :/
Thanks for the links!
Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.