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
Work from home is the ultimate culprit.
A. People can migrate and buy in cheaper parts of the country and maintain jobs that would have required them to stay in a certain geographical area in the past.
B. Work from home has gutted the commercial real estate market. Leading investors to move into the home market. You’re going to see a lot of money flow into single family homes to rent over the next ten years.
You’re now competing against established professionals who are later on in the careers and institutional investors.
100% WFH jobs have rapidly dried up. They’re not super common like they were in 2021-2022. Most places either went back to the office or require a hybrid setup (x # of days in office every so often). I won’t deny WFH jobs have definitely contributed to a general rise in home prices in some areas, but I’d need to see data proving it is heavily contributing to a rise all over.
One of the missing pieces that was mentioned by someone else is the purchase of residential properties by businesses being at all time highs.
WFH is efficient and makes sense in many cases. Private equity firms buying homes and holding them to sweat out the market far beyond what a solo landlord could or would, does not.
Oh, I 100% agree that one of the biggest issues is due to corporate mass house purchasing and squatting. But my understanding was that is a problem in some large metros and the surrounding suburbs around those. For example, in San Francisco, much of the issue is due to NIMBY laws preventing high rise condos/apartments in many areas of the metro, which artificially suppresses the supply of new housing.
Really, there isn’t an all encompassing, singular reason that’s driving up the prices everywhere, but a multitude of them. It’s a difficult problem to tackle, but it’s incredibly frustrating that most governments (local, state, and federal) thus far have made barely any effort to address it.