A lot of people here in the US have bought into this as their retirement strategy. The value needs to go up, so they can downsize and ride the leftover cash for the rest of their life. If the number doesn't go up, they can't retire. This forces otherwise normal people to become very, very, invested in ensuring real estate is an asset with value that outpaces what people can afford. It's a ponzi scheme.

Why do you think opportunity cost isn't coming into play? If you've got a house only as an appreciating asset that's not generating income, you're losing money compared to just throwing it in the stock market. If they're just holding it because the value always goes up, that sounds exactly like 08, and the price would have to come down once the bubble pops.

capping rents to the mortgage means you can only rent out a property at a loss, because you can’t recoup repairs, maintenance, utilities, vacancy, or administrative fees through rent. this effectively makes being a landlord illegal, which you’d might as well do outright if that’s the objective.

and we're soon going to find out if Biden's student loan forgiveness is going to be canned by fascist ideologues or if the midterms spooked them well enough to handle it correctly. If they decide to pull some shenanigans, there's a real possibility that we're staring down the barrel of a 3rd once in a lifetime economic crash from yet another bubble.

Yes, same. I considered buying but given the 3% increase in the interest rate we saw, I'm just going to keep renting and hoping that things come back down before I'm 100 years old.

Honestly I'd scale it. There's a lot of people who don't sell their first home when they move into their second and it's helping them financially to rent it out. I don't want to go after these people...

Raise the tax per every house you're doing it with. Make it prohibitive at scale.

Corporations buying them up to rent out is my speculation, between that, people attempting to flip them, and just regular home buyers, it's making for a very low amount available which causes prices to be high, and new houses aren't being built fast enough to keep up.

Speculation and, more broadly, commodification.

To a degree, construction costs. We tried to build a house a couple of years ago. Got pretty far down the road, having reserved a plot, picked out a floorplan, paint, etc. When it came time to appraise, it appraised $60k under cost and the plans fell through - we'd have had to give up everything that was motivating us to build in the first place and pay twice what out current home costs for essentially a side-grade.

We'll try again once the kids move out and we're looking for a "forever home" without stairs and stuff that we can grow old in.