Hedge funds ain’t helping. But new residential construction never recovered from the last big crash and and has been only at about half the rate before it. Throw in a COVID driven spike in demand and prices are going to get extra crazy no matter what Wall Street vultures do.
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17 ft wide lot. In the current Toronto market it will sell over asking.
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For that area of Colorado Springs, it’s a pretty good deal. It’s just west of Ft Carson army base and right below NORAD and close to the Broadmoor Hotel which is the tony part of town. Anything west of the interstate is perched on the slopes of Pikes Peak and overlooks the city. Looks like the house is on a cul-de-sac and backs up to open space as well. Some of the houses just north of there are in the $1M+ range.
Probably an unaddressed water leak. You’re right that naturally occurring wood rot is not common out here but any source of water can cause rot over time.
The market is so crazy right now that sellers are getting all cash offers above asking price with no appraisals and waived inspections. It’s insane.
In Colorado, it’s pretty common to have fly by night roofing companies go door to door in neighborhoods after a big hail storm to solicit business. The common scam is for them to cover your deductible so there is no out of pocket cost to the homeowner while they submit a jacked-up quote to the insurance company. Then they come out and shoddily slap on new shingles as quickly and as cheaply as possible. They really don’t care if they’re dealing with the actual homeowner or not.
Not really possible as all of these neighborhoods in this area are HOA and covenant controlled. It’s already a borderline McMansion as it is.
I bought my house last year and it’s already appreciated 20% in less than 12 months. The market out here is absolutely insane right now.
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Y’all’re are not wrong.
And.
It may be a lot worse than most folks realize:
D.R. Horton Inc. DHI 1.20% built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale. The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of about 150,000 individuals.
…
From individuals with smartphones and a few thousand dollars to pensions and private-equity firms with billions, yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip. They are competing for houses with ordinary Americans, who are armed with the cheapest mortgage financing ever, and driving up home prices.
Late stage capitalism.
Metasized megawealth.
And it ain’t just residential developments.
It’s also farmland.
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Housing should not be a commodity.
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WHAT THE FUCK
Right?
We can talk for days about what individuals lucky enough to be able to buy (that is, take out a mortgage on) a home should do, but something much bigger is going on right now, with massive amounts of homes being bought up by various outfits. A big shift seems to be coming, including a “crash” at some point, like the mortgage bubble that brought on the 2008 crash.
I’m not normality a cynical doomster, but this shit is scary.
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Agreed, it’s going to be a bigger crash, because I’m guessing it will be both the housing bubble and the student debt “bubble”.
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and of course anything that would relieve the pressure, like renting out your garage, is against the law
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It’s not exactly accurate that investors are “buying every single-family house they can find,” as some have suggested. If that were true, their market share in the United States wouldn’t be a piddling 15 percent. They’re really buying up the stock of relatively inexpensive single-family homes built since the 1970s in growing metro areas. They mostly ignore bigger and more expensive houses, especially ones that are move-in ready: Wealthy boomers and the nation’s finance and tech bros nab those properties. And they’re also ignoring cities with stable or shrinking populations, like Providence and Pittsburgh.
But investors are depleting the inventory of the precise houses that might otherwise be obtainable for younger, working- and middle-class households, in the cities where those workers can easily find good-paying jobs, like Atlanta (22 percent of home purchases according to Redfin data), Charlotte (22 percent), and Phoenix (20 percent). More importantly, they’re able to scour those markets scientifically and systematically to make cash offers on the most attractively priced properties. While normal people buy houses when they actually need to move somewhere, (savvy) investors buy houses several years before a bunch of people need to move to an area. Whether they’re tracking where major employers are building new offices or looking at public school enrollment data, being ahead of the market gives big firms a big leg up.
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A friend in real estate told me in May that houses and condos inside Austin’s city limits are often getting $50K-100K over asking prices, and that the Californians who are buying here are typically showing up with $800K-1M for their starting budget for house-buying. This is her direct experience. I believe her.
Locals are getting priced out of buying and renting, and are fleeing to the larger outlying 5-county area of Austin-sprawl, which is also becoming less affordable. This is all stuff you likely know already.
I wish your aunt and uncle every bit of good luck. Property taxes in Travis County and City of Austin are unbelievably high, even with the homestead exemption and the over-65 year old owner rate freeze (that’s a freeze on the property tax rate once the owner turns 65, not the monetary value amount due, which is likely to still keep rising as long as the property value rises). A 3/2 in South Austin for ~$700K would be a helluva deal in the current market. They’d probably get $1M if they wanted to sell right now. Not that any of us here would then be able to buy something comparable for that same money.
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Honestly not sure if a sudden crash or a long pile-up wreck is more likely, but all this shit’s coming apart at the seams. Vesvius sleeps until it doesn’t. 
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Ha, yes. During the last recession, my wife and I were house shopping, and took a look at a number of foreclosure homes. Not so trashed as that, but appliances and wires stripped, and at least one where a squatter exited the back as well came in the front door.
We took to calling them Reaver Houses.
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“It’s not a fixer upper, it’s a burner downer”
I forgot what movie that is from.
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Mortgage lenders are so lazy/corrupt these days that everything appraises for the asking price in most cities. Especially where there are rising housing prices.
Underwriting is a lost art these days. Banks never take it seriously until after a housing bubble crashes.
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They appraise homes for what it’s worth IF you fix everything that’s wrong with it.
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This. Buyer razes everything down, builds a modern unit and sells for a profit. It’s the land and location driving the price up. Where I live a lot of these end up becoming condo buildings containing flats and studios with outrageously small sizes. Verticalization is very lucrative.
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Cities like the new condo buildings too. Multi-unit dwellings mean more properties to tax on one lot. They’re also new construction, so the units will be taxed at current market rates when occupied.
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My wife and I had the opposite problem here in Cambridge, MA.
We would rent a place for cheap that obviously needed a little TLC, we’d do the work (new patio, paint, garden) then the property manager would bump our rent up a few hundred a month at lease renewal time to the point we couldn’t afford it and have to move. What really irked us was seeing the ads to rent our old place. “Lovely bluestone patio”, “tasteful palate on the walls”, and “tropic-like garden” really irked me.
That was one of my biggest reasons to move to Housepoorland a few years ago
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