UTfball68
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2008
- Location
- Granite Quarry
Housing shortages, much like unemployment must be separated out by region.
Nationwide, we are 20mm houses short, but around your area, there may be a surplus of certain type of homes which don’t match the demographic that’s actually needs houses in your local.
If we build 20mm, $1mm homes, we will still have a housing shortage because not everyone is buying that $$$ home.
The shortage is overall, but is a mix of different types of homes, but likely mostly of median and below homes. That price point lends well to new buyers entering the market or renters that can’t afford their own house. In Greenville, there isn’t a population or jobs to support a $1mm house that will sell in 48 hours; it will sit for months. Charlotte and Raleigh are different; there are many more of those buyers and the house won’t sit as long.
So there really isn’t an easy answer to your question other than it depends. You can’t have a surplus of homes in a specific area, overpriced, and in an area where the population doesn’t exist (or doesn’t want to move to) to support those homes, and compare it to a national # and say there isn’t a shortage. You may have a surplus in your area but then there is an equally depressed market somewhere else. Like NYC, nationwide the unemployment rate is reasonable, but NYC has a rate twice that of the national average.
Now we’re getting somewhere…and actually starts approaching the answer to my question. To make the blanket statement that there’s a housing shortage, feels a bit disingenuous and like it’s going for nothing more than shock factor. What I want to see is ‘we’re 4mil homes short for the $50-100k market, which is 20% of the overall shortage’…‘we’re 10mil short in the $100-150k market, which is 50% of the overall shortage’…so on and so forth. If it is the lower income brackets, that’s no real surprise as they tend to be more sensitive to market/personal fluctuations in general, and I would say it’s somewhat expected for someone working the cash register at Mickey D’s to not be able to get their own place. And also expected for folks that invest in lower valued properties to have difficulty finding what they’re looking for when prices sky rocket. If I’m looking for a target demographic, I look for the trends and try to capitalize before they happen, not be reactive and then say the market dried up. Then normalize that for a given area/region, then normalize that to historic home prices to recalibrate who is in what bracket(is the ratio the same) and an overall normalization for the 20mil short to account for people like my younger sister who wants a house but can’t really afford any bracket. And for me, that should be easily enough calculated…of the folks that apply for the loan, the banks seem to max at <40% debt to income overall including the mortgage. Then what is the ratio of open housing that’s above the market that’s short for a given area. The housing industry has never interested me, maybe those answers are out there…if we know we’re 20mil short, we must know who, where and what demographic, right? And then what’s the reality of a new $100k house in Raleigh/Charlotte…or where/whatever the shortage is?
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