Today’s Dream House May Not Be Tomorrow’s

HOUSES are just buildings, but homes are often beautiful dreams. Unfortunately, as millions of people have learned in the housing crisis, those dreams don’t always comport with reality.

Economic and demographic changes may severely impair the value of a home when it’s time to sell, a decade or more in the future. Will a particular home still be fashionable then? Will social and economic shifts tilt demand toward new designs and types of communities —even toward renting rather than an outright purchase? Any of these factors could affect home prices substantially. 

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Before Housing Bubbles, There Was Land Fever

SINCE 1997, we have lived through the biggest real estate bubble in United States history — followed by the most calamitous decline in housing prices that the country has ever seen.

Fundamental factors like inflation and construction costs affect home prices, of course. But the radical shifts in housing prices in recent years were caused mainly by investor-induced speculation.  

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Why Home Prices Change (or Don’t)

WHAT prices will today’s home buyers get if they sell a decade from now?

Most people live in their home for many years. They don’t need to view it as an investment at all, but if they do, they surely need a long forecasting horizon.

The problem is that modern economics has a poor understanding of past movements in home prices. And that makes the task of predicting the state of the market in 2023 challenging, at the very least. Still, we can learn something by analyzing the factors that affect home prices in general.

There has been some good news lately: home prices have risen over the last year, and with those gains there has been a renewed sense of optimism. But do these price increases mean that homes are now good investments for the long haul?

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