In 2024, there were more home buyers over the age of 70 in the U.S. than under the age of 35
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The average age of a first time home buyer is 38 years old.
The average age of a homebuyer is 52.
They have never been this high, and everyone knows price is the problem.
The problem is that everyone is focused on supply ONLY. They're not considering that people are buying houses to rent, rather than live in to respond to the perpetual loss of savings and income and they don't want to accept that 30 million people shouldn't be in the country.
that being said, the system is not sustainable and will continue to stumble and fail.
While the true crash I was worried about hasn't happened yet, there's no evidence of it being avoided, and delinquencies and fraud are massively up.
Given the amount of homes that are being used for Air B&B and rental properties, I think when this bubble starts to pop, people will try to dump their house on the market, and it will cause prices to fucking crash faster than anyone can react. We're going to have a literal "run" on the housing market. There's only about 400,000 homes on the market at any given time. If that number doubles in a month, you can't stop the crash.
They gotta stop letting foreign nationals buy up the houses. It's such a frenzy right now they are using middle men / bots. it's making a huge bubble, while fucking everyone who actually wants to... live in a house.
Guns are the only way that will ever stop, and no one will ever use guns. Just get used to this.
We should also probably stop letting foregin nationals in.
What will this mean for those of us sitting on a large pile of cash? Will this be a good time to buy homes or is it just going to kick the entire society into a tailspin and I should be concerned about something else entirely?
It would be the same as in 2008. Everyone with money would buy, centralizing real estate even more into fewer hands.
Your cash is utterly worthless and depreciating every single second.
It's not a good time to buy homes, but when housing prices crater, I can't tell you honestly that anyone's going to have a good time at that point either.
If you're sitting on a large pile of cash it might be worth it to consider buying a house you know is going to lose 10%-30% value in the next decade in the market crash, and treating it as an investment for such a purpose. Depending on your 'pile', it might be worth not taking out a mortgage, buying the house, and making permanent improvements on it that you know will make the house worth more over time (like adding a 80 year metal roof, installing granite counter tops, reworking the insulation to make it proper).
Alternatively, you can take out a small mortgage on a cheap home that you can do improvements on, and focusing on growing your 'pile' through other investments.
If you can get a 20% downpayment, you can also eliminate mortgage insurance in a lot of mortgages, which can seriously help reduce payments, or even buy down the rate, and doing the above.
It mostly depends on the size of your pile. If it's 100k, all of the above options are available to you. If it's 10k. then a home might not be a great investment without you and your family doing a lot of work.
I was convinced said crash was going to happen in 2020/2021 and then COVID happened and rather than crashing, rates went down and prices went up. But then rates went up and prices stayed the same because sellers don't want to give up a 2.5% mortgage with a 7% mortgage. What would cause the housing market to collapse? Honestly curious/asking.
If rates go down will that incentivize sellers to finally sell? But historically rates down/prices up because borrowing gets cheaper. So what's to stop boomer sellers from asking for outrageous prices like they are now?
Depopulation and inability to pay for higher prices.
Immigration is one of the leading purposes of decreasing housing supply, so that will help to some degree. However, there's another problem of just a decreasing population which can't really be contained. Gen X had less kids than GG'ers did, and Millennials had less kids than everyone before them. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are barren. The demand is technically high for housing, but as Boomers die, no one can replace them. Either institutions will have to expand massively their ownership of property, or they will simply enter onto the market, and be too expensive for their family or bank to profit off of. Hence, prices will have to come down because these younger generations simply don't have the savings to afford these houses.
"Okay, but couldn't they just rent the property?"
Not if they need the cash right now. Renting comes with managing the property, and that's expensive. If it's not worth it to keep, they'll sell it. And there's such a glut of rentals at this point that there's barely a point to keep renting even now.