The housing market is a disaster!

[britanica]

I don't know if anyone else here has been following it but my husband and I have been trying to buy a home now for a year and a half and every time we find a house we like, it either goes through to pending a sale in 3 days (too soon for us to even consider it) OR someone offers too much over the asking price that we can't counter bid on it. All the homes in our price range sell like hotcakes! It is making it hard to buy anything. Houses $320k and less seem to be selling way too fast and most of them are overpriced for what you get. Then you have rising property taxes and interest on mortgages. When we started looking at homes a year and a half ago, for good credit is was 1.8% and now it is 5.4%! I can't help but feel like this is all by design because the people at the top want us all renting and not owning anything.

[YellowDragon]

In the US, the housing market has been a mess for years now, it is just substantially worse now. 

A lot of younger people and couples who are not able to afford to buy still are hoping for a crash but with the way interest rates are going, it will still end up being expensive. I think the highest point was in the 80s where interest rates hit 16% in the US but houses back then were like $50k for a huge house. Now they want $200k for a hole in the wall. 

[britanica]

On 8/22/2022 at 2:04 PM, YellowDragon said:

In the US, the housing market has been a mess for years now, it is just substantially worse now. 

A lot of younger people and couples who are not able to afford to buy still are hoping for a crash but with the way interest rates are going, it will still end up being expensive. I think the highest point was in the 80s where interest rates hit 16% in the US but houses back then were like $50k for a huge house. Now they want $200k for a hole in the wall. 

I just feel like they did this on purpose at this point. Like they want people renting, not owning land. They want a means to constantly gain money from people. They still do via property tax even after a home is paid off but the government is so greedy, that they want more. 

[YellowDragon]

On 8/23/2022 at 2:05 PM, britanica said:

I just feel like they did this on purpose at this point. Like they want people renting, not owning land. They want a means to constantly gain money from people. They still do via property tax even after a home is paid off but the government is so greedy, that they want more. 

They absolutely are. You just need to pay attention to what the people at the top want and they don't want us owning houses or land. Heck, they don't even want us driving cars. They want us all compacted into cities away from everything else so they can do as they please where they please. Ironically enough, this is WAY worse for the environment. Most pollution in the US, for example, comes from cities like NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. and they are some of the most toxic places to live too. I visited NYC for the first time in 2015 and ended up sick from the air pollution. I was coughing up all sorts, my skin became dry, my hair was falling out... This was just in 2 weeks spending time there. After I left, I felt better immediately. Now imagine living there for years or even decades. 

[britanica]

On 8/25/2022 at 1:52 PM, YellowDragon said:

They absolutely are. You just need to pay attention to what the people at the top want and they don't want us owning houses or land. Heck, they don't even want us driving cars. They want us all compacted into cities away from everything else so they can do as they please where they please. Ironically enough, this is WAY worse for the environment. Most pollution in the US, for example, comes from cities like NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. and they are some of the most toxic places to live too. I visited NYC for the first time in 2015 and ended up sick from the air pollution. I was coughing up all sorts, my skin became dry, my hair was falling out... This was just in 2 weeks spending time there. After I left, I felt better immediately. Now imagine living there for years or even decades. 

Geeze that sounds terrible. I have never been there but I have heard of people making similar complaints because they have never spent extended time in heavily polluted cities. I know I haven't. I do know that while my closest major city isn't exactly clean, it is not as bad as others and I can feel the difference of the air quality. I guess cities like NYC produce acid rain too.