No. of Recommendations: 4
Few places are average, but to the extent it matters, constant quality US residential real estate rose in price at only inflation + 1%/year in the 20th century.
100% makes sense. It is also easy to get too excited by the increase in house prices in the last couple of decades, which is mostly a result of interest rates going down from double digit rates to close to 0%. That won't happen again. I still remember my first mortgage cost me 10.5% in 1991. And we bought our first house (1500 sq ft) at the bottom of housing recession driven by the end of cold war which shrunk the defense industry in CA in 91 & sold it in 97 for roughly the same price to trade into a bigger house.
This is a snippet from Alice Schroeder's Snowball: Warren particularly disliked buying houses, considering money spent on them as lying fallow, not earning its keep.
