“It’s A Housing Supply Issue.” Wait, What If It’s A Greed Issue?
There are a lot of potential places to begin this post, but this one just popped into my head, so I’ll go with it. In probably early 2020, right before the pandemic, my wife (then just “girlfriend”) and I were looking at potential homes to buy. We eventually did buy in September of 2020. We went to this one house, about two miles from where we currently live, and it was basically a 1974 pornographic film set with a random grand piano and a sunken living room. It did have a nice view of downtown, although the backyard sloped downward drastically, and I have a large dog who was aging at the time. If you read the one-sheet on this house, virtually nothing had been updated since about 1998. The windows were not even up to grade/code.
Asking? You guessed it. $495,000.
So, half a million on a house that I’d probably need to put another $150,000 into, if not more. Now, the good thing is that right before the pandemic, rates were probably 2.8% on a 30-year note, so that's helpful. But during this period, from February to September 2020, I probably looked at 35–40 homes, all in a “high-growth” area of North Texas. And while some were nice and updated and had clean lines and nice yards, what struck me about the…
