I tend to agree though, the housing market where I live a $400,000 house use to be pretty unaffordable to most of the population. The majority of people who could afford it were out of town people and most of the locals couldn't. Now just to get a decent home it costs almost $400,000. Locals all complain that there is nowhere affordable to live and are really struggling. The market is likely going to crash. But a lot of the market has also been bought up by out of town people who do have the money. They just turn around and rent a lot of that stuff out via air bnb (Lake Ozarks gets a lot of vacationers). So maybe those houses won't get foreclosed on. But you can only have so many airbnb's before companies have issues renting stuff out.
I was lucky enough though that I bought my house right before the market jumped and sold my old house after it went up. In the end I made out well although had I waited longer to sell I could have made more. But carrying a second property was kind of a pain. Two yards to mow and such. And the second house served no purpose, I only did it in that order because I wanted to clean the old one out before I tried to sell it.
That's awesome, and yeah, it probably helped you make a lot more money than if you had to do it my way, which was, I had to sell my existing one first to get approved for a loan on a new one.
But yeah, I don't know if we will see a huge 2009 style crash but to think prices are going to stay where they are is delusional, and also, I'm already seeing price drops on Zillow pretty commonly.
I can tell you that when I sold mine back in 2021, I was approved for one number. Then after I was renting for a year on the same salary, no raise, no interest rate reduction, I somehow got approved for 100k more.
So that tells you about lending standards. The banks thought I was only safe paying one number a month, but then when prices went up, suddenly I was safe to pay a much higher number every month.
Which if they had given me that higher number the year earlier I would have actually been able to get something that I could now afford, ironically, because prices are now $200k-$250k above what I was looking to spend back in 2021. What I could once get for $400k is now more like $600k.
