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The value of a house is that you have a place to live. A house is not an “investment”. It has no cash flow. It does not generate wealth. A house becomes less useful with time due to entropy (albeit more slowly than most other physical assets). One would expect the real value of the average house to go down with time.
I feel bad for the people who got duped, but this really should have been obvious. Artificial scarcity is not wealth. Abundance is wealth.
As a specific example, my understanding is that the Japanese housing market does work this way, largely because there is a strong cultural demand for new houses, to the extent of replacing usable existing structures being common.
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A house is not only an investment, houses have cash flows so large it burns the Treasury's butt that they can't tax them. Second largest "tax expenditure" after medical premiums and just before 401Ks is "Exclusion of net imputed rental income". Of course, you might object that these aren't real cash flows (which they aren't, hence "imputed")... but they are spending avoided. They also provide a one-time inflow when sold, of course.
But in fact houses generally gain real value with time. I expect this to change in 10-15 years, but for now, they gain, not because any intrinsic properties but because of good old supply and demand. Well, that, and the fact that people do tend to fight entropy by doing maintenance and sometimes upgrades, which you need to account for.
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For the first couple of years after I bought my house, I let out a room to a friend who was in grad school. It wasn't a ton of money, but it was positive cash flow. Doing that with a rental would be a lot more problematic.
In practice it probably wouldn’t, I’ll wager thé majority of people doing this are renters.
Could you expand on that? Maybe it’s just the bubble I live in but that’s hard for me to imagine
Illegal sublets are incredibly common in both apartments and rented houses. It's pretty normal for apartments to only have one roommate's name on the lease(usually the guy with the better credit score). Lots of people do it- half a one bedroom apartment is much cheaper than one one bedroom apartment. And rented houses do the same thing all the time, only with more roommates. You can go on craigslist in your city and see examples, price range, etc, although it will also include owned homes, grouphouses, flophouses, etc.
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