Shocking REALITY - Housing Market Boomtowns AFTER Pandemic

[@jeffpiatt3879]

Housing will continue to go up since it's tied directly to inflation. The real rate of inflation is 10% or more per year- hence the price runups we have seen. If you live in a "big city" like Austin, you can sell at whatever price you can get and buy much cheaper in a rural area. Lower house price, lower taxes, lower utilities. If you can work remote, why not? If you are an adult (you have kids) , the "downtown" of any large city in America has nothing to offer you.

[@SFSCharles]

You bring up some valid points. The population in the city of Austin has decreased in the last year, while the populations in the surrounding counties, Williamson and Hays, continue to boom. This has been driven by the lower prices for homes and the availability of new construction.

[@RandomPersonOnTheLine]

Austin is going to continue to decline in the short term because we are building so much very quickly. This is making the cost to live and do business here lower, which in the long term should be beneficial. Unfortunately, that's also why we are getting these new highway abominations like the 183 and 35 expansions. Apparently, we just want to look like Houston now. The wildest part to me is the office situation. They are building a massive office complex near my house while there are several office buildings within a mile of these new ones that have been vacant since 2020. There's also a bunch of vacancies in the Domain, and they supposedly were going to build a ton of offices with that uptown project. Which from my understanding has been reined in heavily. There are also plans to make a ton of offices with that River Park plan and a bunch of other random smaller projects scattered throughout the metro.

[@SFSCharles]

You bring up some excellent points! The rapid development can definitely have its pros and cons, and it's interesting to see how it all plays out for Austin in the long term.

[@uumlau]

IF we've had roughly a 20% increase in general inflation since 2020, it might very well be the case that if we adjust for that, the price increase you document might perhaps be price decreases in "real" terms. It's always a lot of guesswork when talking about inflation, because different markets can inflate differently, but I think it makes sense that if the general price of goods has gone up by 20% or more, that means the dollars chasing housing are theoretically 20% less (keeping the math simple, here - 20% increase is not the same as 20% decrease, but it's close enough to make my point). In other words, housing prices could "crash", but it would be mostly be hidden by extremely high inflation rates.

[@SFSCharles]

You bring up some valid points. One component that is often not talked about is the shortage of homes. The chart in the video about new construction showed that the metros in the south and west led the nation in new building starts, but Providence and Hartford in the northeast had some of the lowest number of new builds.