Is a house still a good investment?

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1:01It's now on Opel Grill on Saturday, 24 January, with your partner. More on Opel.de.

1:31cities and called in with a question that's on more than a few people's minds. Is it worth it to buy a house? I think that's always been the go-to investment for like past generations of like you buy a house and that's kind of your retirement plan. And that just doesn't seem realistic or even attainable to buy a house. So it's like, should I even try to do it? Is that something I should do? This is a question I've wondered about, too. Okay, I'm going to be honest. I love to scroll through real estate websites. But should we be buying homes? Given the economy and the interest rates, it can often feel like a fantasy.

2:13The market is just so much more different than it was when our parents were looking for starter homes. Is this really where our money should be going? To get an answer, I called up James Rodriguez, senior real estate reporter at Business Insider. Do you ever just like scroll through Zillow dreaming of what it would be like to own your own home or am I telling on myself? Not at all. I do that all the time. So the conventional wisdom is that buying a home is the way to build wealth in here in America. Is that true? Has that ever been true? Definitely with past generations, and I think especially has this hold on people today when they've seen especially baby boomers who may have bought homes decades ago and have reaped all the rewards from this really crazy moment in the housing market where prices jumped so substantially during the pandemic.

3:09If you compare the end of 2019 to the beginning of this year, home prices are up about 50%. So historically, we have seen people invest a lot in their homes. And for some people, it is absolutely true that they have reaped substantial rewards. I think it's important to look closer at that, though, and see that for some people, it has been really perilous. There have been periods of home price declines. We saw this during the great financial crisis in 2008 when some people lost all the money that they had put into their homes because of the foreclosure crisis. And so I think it's important to recognize that while that has been true for some people, it hasn't been true for everyone.

3:57And it may not be something that's true in the future. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about why that conventional wisdom around home buying and building wealth isn't hitting quite like it used to. What's different for today's homebuyers? I think we just see the affordability aspect. People are stretched so thin budget wise. The majority of middle class Americans say that they are struggling financially. financially. Their financial stress has increased since before the COVID-19 pandemic began. So when you look at inflation, economic instability, a lack of savings, all of these have increased the share of Americans feeling financially stressed.

4:39Mortgage rates, they went super low during the pandemic. They were at record lows and that allowed people to get in because even if prices were rising, the rate on their loan was so low that you could kind of stomach the monthly payments and make it work, whereas now we've seen mortgage rates rise to more than double those levels. And home prices haven't really stopped climbing, especially in areas where there's still not a lot of homes on the market. So there's uncertainty around just the future of the economy. Interest rates are up. So all of that together really makes it hard to see a future in which people who are already stretched thin renting, how do you save up money for a down payment?

5:21How do you justify these higher mortgage rates? And how do you bring it all together to become a homeowner? It's a real challenge right now.

5:36Is this the case in particular for Zoomers and millennials who are looking to buy homes in their 20s and 30s? Like, it just feels so, like, I don't know. I just think of, oh, baby boomers, they got to get their house for like$5. and now the rest of us have been priced out and they're aging in place. Like there's just so much. And I don't want to just blame baby boomers. It's very easy to do that. That's a little unfair. But yeah, what's keeping these younger generations out? It is easy to blame baby boomers, especially when they've been so fortunate in the housing market at large. But I think one of the things you have to think about too is the demographic side of things.

6:12And we had this huge wave of millennials, currently the largest living generation in the US, We knew that they were going to be hitting their prime home buying years around the turn of the decade, 2010s going into 2020. And there was just not enough building happening after the Great Recession to keep up with all of that demand that was on the horizon. So you had people who were also starting to work remotely, and so they wanted more space. And it can be tough to have an optimistic outlook for home buying chances when all of these forces seem to be conspiring against younger generations in ways that older generations just didn't have to deal with.

6:54I think we're still feeling the effects of the Great Recession in that respect. A report released today by the National Association of Realtors paints a picture with housing data. The Great Recession hits. Employment there fell 1.5 million. We have not recovered that over all these years. We are still short of around 500 ,000 workers in construction. Another reason why you saw home prices rise so dramatically is not only were millennials competing against their generation, but they were also competing against baby boomers in the market who had cash, who had substantial savings, and were able to, in a lot of cases, bid up home prices.

7:34And we're seeing, as you mentioned, baby boomers staying in their homes longer than ever. But eventually, they will be aging out of the market, which is kind of a euphemistic way of saying dying. And when you look ahead to that and substantially less people competing for homes in the U.S., you see household growth slowing down as well. More deaths from boomers combined with lower birth rates over the next couple of decades. And all that equates to weaker demand for homes going from 2030 through 2040. Yeah. Can you sort of run through kind of what the home buying experience and, you know, growth has been like from the boomer side and then sort of compare it to how it goes now?

8:18Yeah. So you think of a baby boomer who maybe they bought a home in 1994 and they hold on to it for the life of their mortgage for 30 years. And then they sold last year for, if you look at typical home price increases, a 305 % gain. So that's, you know, say they bought a$300 ,000 home. It's worth more than a million dollars by the time they sell it. Woo. Okay. You can retire with that. It's a crazy return. It's really mind-boggling to think about. And the same millennial who maybe bought a$300 ,000 home in 2010, they might not see as substantial increases over the next 30 years, but they still got to reap all the benefits of those crazy pandemic years when home prices were rising around 50%.

9:05And so you bring that forward and you consider all the gains since 2010. And then you look at people who are buying homes today and it starts to raise questions about, will younger buyers today get the same financial benefits of homeownership as their predecessors? What would it mean for the economy if housing wasn't this go-to way to build wealth? Like if that was not the answer for how do I get a net worth? I think that's a really interesting question and one that honestly, we don't know because for so long it has been looked at as the primary method of wealth building. You think about millennials, the typical elder millennial who's born in the 80s, they saw their wealth, the value of their assets increased by more than 57 percent just between 2019 and 2022.

10:01too. And 41 % of that, 41 percentage points was attributable to real estate. So it's a huge portion of people's assets. I think it's just, it's tough because for every person who owns that real estate, it's all concentrated in this one asset that's not diversified. It's not like it's in the stock market. And if one of your, one of the companies in your portfolio tanks, It's OK because you've spread out the risk amongst multiple companies. It's really all concentrated in this one thing that can be threatened by a wildfire or a flood. And that can be concerning for anyone looking at the housing market and seeing so much of that wealth concentrated in homes.

10:49That threat of wildfires and floods James mentioned, it's real. How much has climate change raised insurance prices and how much should we really worry about that when we're thinking of buying a home? That's coming up after the break.

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13:56We're back. It's Explain It To Me. And we're talking about whether it's a good idea to buy a house these days. It's 2025 and climate change is definitely a factor. So I called up Dr. Jeremy Porter. He heads up research into housing and climate for First Street. They analyze the climate risk of homes and share that analysis with websites like Zillow and Redfin. It really is the point at which your standard American feels climate change. I mean, we're seeing that there's more hurricanes. Breaking news, Hurricane Barrows slamming Texas, making landfall just a few hours ago. Francine is now a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico heading for Louisiana.

14:39Whipping winds, torrential downpours, and communities submerged. Hurricane Debbie wreaking havoc across the coast. This is the city of Asheville in the western mountains of North Carolina, 2 ,000 feet above sea level and hundreds of miles away from the nearest coastline. But such was the force of Hurricane Helene. We're seeing that there's more extreme precipitation events. What we saw in LA is that there's more wildfires, more severe wildfires than we've seen in the past. But the way that it's affecting individuals is that we're seeing more property damage, more people being impacted by these events directly to their properties or to their communities.

15:18Fear and concern is growing tonight as flames light up the Los Angeles hillsides. Firefighters are scrambling to contain several major fires tonight. Just into our newsroom, we are learning of another fire erupting this time in Silmar in the San Fernando Valley. Overnight, catastrophic damage reported as severe storms slammed the central U.S. A tornado emergency in northeastern Arkansas. Powerful twisters destroying homes. In Missouri, an EF1 tornado, winds nearing 100 miles an hour, causing widespread destruction in the town of Nevada. Homes and businesses reduced to rubble. Lots of times people live in places like Miami or they live in Houston.

15:58And they'll say, you know, the weather's always been like this in the area that I'm at. And they'll say, well, what about insurance? And they'll say, well, insurance is killing me. And lots of times people won't make the connection that the reason insurance is spiking is because there's more damages and there's more payouts from the insurance companies. That's really interesting. Our caller is in her late 20s, Miranda. She lives in the Twin Cities, and she's considering whether buying a house is the right decision for her. What would you say to someone like her? I think we're at a point at which we finally have data to help make decisions like this.

16:36And I think one of the biggest problems that we've seen so far in the way that climate and real estate are being covered is that climate's driving down the value of home prices. It's sort of reversing the trend that we've had in the U.S. for a century where the American dream was owning a property, and people have aspired to do that. I think what we're seeing, though, is that there's a lot more nuance to the decision-making process than simply avoiding homeownership because of climate risk. I don't think people should avoid homeownership. I think it's still a good investment. I think that there are ways to optimize that process now, though, that do include taking climate into account the same way we've taken other factors into account in the past.

17:18How do I, you know, optimize the home buying process so that I'm reducing the risk and maybe I'm buying a home that has, you know, a flood score of a 5 instead of a flood score of a 10? What's an example of that? The quintessential example in Miami has been sort of this movement from parts of the Miami Beach, sort of coastal region into an area called Little Haiti that's further inland in Miami-Dade County. It's right along the railroad tracks. It's the high point of Miami-Dade County. And people on the real estate market at that time were asking their realtors for, you know, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2 ,000 square feet and a certain level of elevation.

17:58They wanted to be a certain level above sea level because of tidal flooding and because of increasing sea level tidal flooding events along the coast. And sort of the limestone bedrock in Miami meant there really wasn't anywhere safe. The water got underground and it rose up through the ground. But high points, places like Little Haiti, became much more valuable than they had been prior to this because people were aware of the flooding risk within that market. I wonder how all of this plays a role in like inequity and gentrification and things like that. Like who's getting pushed where? Who's having the impacts of climate change?

18:36Yeah, and that Miami example that I gave earlier, it was part of an analysis back in 2017, and the title of the paper that it came out in was called Climate Gentrification. It was people leaving the Miami Beach area, moving into the little Haiti area, which had been a less desirable area. It was primarily a more vulnerable socioeconomic community, a minority community, and people were moving in. and they were driving up the cost of real estate in the area. So having the information and integrating it into the process of the home buying process, I guess, it does have consequences in terms of potentially giving those that have the means to avoid climate risk the ability to do so.

19:24And those that don't have the means are ultimately unable to. You know, we've been talking about these climate scores as a way to help people find a home to buy, but so much of our wealth in America is tied up in home ownership. I wonder if there's a flip side to this where it's negatively impacting home values. There absolutely is a negative impact to having a high climate risk score. I think we've already seen, even through the integration of the data on one of the sites on redfin.com, they did an analysis where they exposed half the people that came to the site to the data. They didn't expose the other half of the people to the data.

20:09And the people that were exposed to the data systematically searched for lower risk homes. That means the higher risk homes are staying on the market longer. They have lower list to sale prices or sale to list prices, sorry, on the market. And they are losing property value because of that. Ultimately, that makes its way into the transaction record and depresses the value of property value in specific neighborhoods. Overall, how much of a science versus an art is it to factor in climate change predictions? Like, you know, there's geopolitics, there's a human factor on top of weather and all these external events.

20:48Like, how do you do that? Yeah, and it's an important part of our analysis because a lot of research that exists today basically says, hey, sea level rise is happening on the coast. Millions of people are going to move away from the coast. But if you just if you go back and model the data historically and you layer in to your point all this geopolitical information, all of this economic investment information, really the social, political and economic drivers of place, why people choose to live where people end up living. Those things outweigh climate risk in a lot of cases.

21:27Okay, so the story is bigger than just climate. And in fact, the story of home buying is bigger than any one single factor. What that means for those of us still considering opting into the home ownership society and also what to do if you aren't. That's coming up after this break.

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22:44We're back. This is Explain It To Me, and I was super excited to get to call up our next guest. Hey, I'm Mandy Woodruff-Santos, and my podcast is called Brown Ambition. Okay, so I have to admit, I am a Brown Ambition listener. You know, I'm trying to get my big girl finances in order. So I'm very happy to be talking with you today about home ownership, which feels like one of the big girl finance things. Yeah, it sure is, isn't it? I mean, at least that's what society wants us to think. Gotta get a Birkin, gotta get a home. Big Birkin, big, whole five, six, big-ish. Are you a homeowner? I am. Yeah, I am.

23:21I bought my house in 2018, which feels like a thousand years ago. This is pre-motherhood, pre-pandemic. And at the time, our total mortgage, which included property tax and the actual loan monthly principal that we were paying, was about$2 ,700. That's increased a thousand bucks since then. So now I'm spending$3 ,600. So nearly$4 ,000. Oh, my gosh. And I'm like, oh, I'm reminded. Oh, yeah, that's why I always feel broke. Yeah, it's interesting. This question we got jumped out to me because it's one that I have, too. So I'm a renter and I have a lot of friends who have bought or just starting to buy.

24:00And I admit that I have not completely given up a little bit of a dream of owning a sexy condo in the city. Like, that is how I see. I don't know if I like I'm not trying to have a yard or anything, but, you know, I could I could live in a condo. Yards are overrated. So I support that. Yeah. And we've been told for years that buying a home is this important milestone for adulthood. And, you know, it's this first step to building equity and wealth and generational wealth. I wonder what you make of the question from our listener. Like, should she buy a house? Is this something she should be working towards?

24:32There's all sorts of like different trains of thought about is it a good investment to buy a house? And I think you have to understand why you're buying a house. Are you buying a house for your family to live in for the next 10 plus years? That's a very different equation to me than are you buying a home that you're hoping to fix up, flip on the market in a year or two. Now, if you really want to buy a house and it is your dream and you love everything that you understand what goes into it, you understand. Listen, I didn't understand how much property taxes could be. I thought my mortgage was just going to be my mortgage, but you add in property taxes, it just about doubled it, which was crazy to me.

25:12if you understand maintenance, if you understand how property values can, yes, typically they do go up, but how they can be impacted by things like development and by weather patterns, like global warming is real. If you understand all these things and you still really want to buy a house, then yeah, go get your house. Especially, I mean, like the ultimate thing is, can you afford it? Of course, mortgage rates. I know they're not cute, right? At all. Very ugly right now to me. But they're not as ugly as they could be. Like in the 80s, you know, people were just walking out the door with like double digit interest rates like it was nothing.

25:48That was like the norm, right? So they're not great, but they're not the worst they've ever been. What's more difficult these days is inventory. What I wouldn't do today is because there's such like a dearth of good properties on the market, I wouldn't just buy whatever's there just because you want to buy something like I got to get it. You know, I would if you can wait, wait until you find a home that you really like that fits all your needs. It's worth it. Yeah. So if you sit down and you go through these numbers, you do the checklist, you find out where you are emotionally lifestyle and you're like, OK, buying a house, that is for me, that is what I want to do.