Tag: housing

Housing

The Bank of England’s Bank Underground blog has two excellent posts on house prices (first this one, then this one). The basic idea is that houses are assets, not goods, since the “goods” consumed is “living”, which is basically a point in time thing.

As the first of these posts points out:

You can’t buy flowers when they are cheap and store them for months until Valentine’s day. Similarly, you can’t store housing services by, say, renting two flats this year and saving one’s rental services for next year. So the price of rents is determined “on the spot” by the current balance of demand and supply of places to live. Add a load of extra people and/or make them richer and the higher demand pushes up rents. Boost supply and rents fall.

Combined with this comes the news that a friend’s parents have moved to Mysore (from Bangalore) for their retirement.

Taking these blogposts, and this piece of news, together, I’m beginning to reconsider my views on housing.

About 7-8 years back, I got “personal finance advice” that one needs to start “saving for retirement” at age 30, and one of the best ways of doing that is to buy a house. I was about to turn 30 around then, and I took this advice seriously enough to invest in an apartment in 2014. Looking at it five years on, I’m not sure buying a house for retirement in your thirties is the best idea.

For starters, India is (still) a fast-growing and fast-changing nation, so I have no clue what are going to be good places to live 10 years down the line (forget 30 or 40, at which point I’ll retire).

Secondly, my needs from a house now are very different from what they will be 30 or 40 years down the line. For example, right now, my daughter’s school is a “fixed point” (assuming I don’t want to change that), and I need a house that isn’t too far from there. As she grows up and grows out of school, this will cease to be a factor.

Similarly, the work that I do demands a certain pattern of travel in the city, and that again guides my choice of place to live. This is likely to change as the years go by as well.

Then, what I need from my house and my surroundings are likely to change as well. For example, I might want peace and quiet right now, and might be willing to take my car everywhere. At some other point in time, I might place a higher premium on shops in a walkable distance. Similarly, my preferences on entertainment activities might change as well.

Taking all this into account, making a housing decision now on where I want to live 15-20 years down the line is futile. There are simply too many variables and any decision I take now will only lock me in to something that is possibly not optimal.

From that point of view I need to look at my needs over the next 10-15 years (when things will change, but maybe not by that much) to make my current investing decisions. This includes rent/buy/sell decisions, taking into account whatever I’m optimising for now, and will in the next few years. And if I’m setting aside money to “buy a house for retirement” now, I should simply just focus on saving and growing that money so that I can make an informed decision at a time when it matters, and matters are more clear.

Why Real Estate Prices are High

World over, high housing prices seem to be a problem. They’ve always been an issue in India. They are an issue in the US, where millennials are not able to afford houses to live in. In the UK as well, rising housing prices mean that today’s young are unable to buy up houses. The global phenomenon that is driving all this is the drive towards increasingly large cities.

Going by first principles, there are two major components that determine the cost of a house (note that I said cost and not price) – the cost of the land and the cost of construction. It can be safely assumed that the latter hasn’t increased at a rate dramatically higher than inflation over the years.

Yes, there are bubbles and busts in prices of commodities such as steel and cement. Houses nowadays are being built largely to better specifications and quality than earlier homes. In places like the US, modern houses are  bigger. But all this is balanced by technological innovation which makes stuff cheaper. So on an average, the increase in construction costs over the years is not dramatic.

That implies that the massive increase in price of housing the world over is driven by  increasing costs of land. Some scaremongers will try to tell you that this is due to there being too many human beings in the world, and we are soon headed for a Malthusian collapse. However, the land needed for housing is small, compared to say agriculture, so regular transfer of land from agriculture to housing should take care of this. So why are land prices increasing so much?

It has to do with the distribution. During most of the 20th century, manufacturing being the base of the economy meant that a lot of smaller cities and towns flourished. These cities and towns were either located conveniently enough to tap raw materials or markets for industrial goods, or were helped by the fact that land requirements for industries meant that big cities would get expensive very soon for industries, driving development to smaller cities and towns.

As the share of populations in manufacturing falls, and more people move into services, the larger cities gain at the expense of smaller cities and towns. This means the distribution of demand has changed massively over the last 30 years or so. Rather than demand being more or less uniform over cities, nowadays most of the housing demand is spread over a few small cities.

And these cities aren’t able to keep up. Supply in some cities such as San Francisco and Mumbai, are constrained by regulations on how much can be built. Other cities such as Bangalore or Houston have expanded radially, but housing in the far suburbs is much less attractive than closer to town (due to increased transport costs), and there is only so much supply in “convenient areas” of towns.

This changing pattern of urbanisation is leading to rapid increase in the prices of housing in places that people want to live in. And so millennials are being priced out, unable to buy homes. The distribution of jobs across cities means they don’t have the luxury of “settling down” in smaller cities and towns where housing is still affordable. And until the larger cities hit their limits of growth and businesses start moving to smaller cities (thus creating newer hubs), this housing shortage will exist.