A few days ago, I got an email from a man who chastised me for my skepticism about investing in housing today. He identified himself as a former US Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War who subsequently became a stockbroker and banker before retiring recently. “You, as an educated person,” he wrote, “should be helping and promoting the ownership of real estate.”
He was responding to my warning about a bubble in home prices in many places around the world. According to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, US home prices rose at a record rate of 19.7% in the last year, and now look very unstable. They might increase further for a while, but that may be followed by serious declines.
Still, my correspondent was at least partly right about what I should say to the public about homeownership. In particular, we should recognize its big-picture effect on our lives, despite the recent extreme price volatility.
But investing in housing in booming locations may not be as safe a long-term bet as many seem to think. Prospective US home buyers might logically assume that their tenure in a house will outlast any interruption to an upward trend in home prices, enabling them eventually to benefit from new highs. After all, real home prices in the United States fell by 36% nationally from December 2005 to February 2012, because of the Great Recession, but then increased by 71% to a level 10% above their 2005 peak.
However, I have been arguing for years that the US housing market’s performance since 2005 is not the only relevant example of long-term home-price trends. My historical data show that real US national home prices were sometimes lower in the 1990s than in the 1890s. Over that century, cities spread out to cheaper land, and building tools, technology, and transportation became more efficient.
Moreover, land itself is still cheap: the average cost today of one acre (0.4 hectares) of US farmland—onto which one can easily squeeze four or five houses—is only $3,380. Yes, farmland may be far away from cities, but history shows that cities start sprouting up in new places as the population increases.
Enjoy unlimited access to the ideas and opinions of the world’s leading thinkers, including weekly long reads, book reviews, topical collections, and interviews; The Year Ahead annual print magazine; the complete PS archive; and more—for less than $9 a month.
Nevertheless, the Air Force pilot turned banker disagreed with my real-estate outlook. “In this country, like all developed countries, real estate is at the root of wealth as measured by money value,” he wrote. “It has been that way for at least a thousand years, and there is no indication we are creating any more real estate.”
So, let’s imagine that, for the past 1,000 years, home prices had beaten the US stock market’s average 7% annual return (after reinvesting dividends) in the twentieth century. During that time, these home prices, after compounding, would have increased by a factor of 24 followed by 28 zeroes.
But hardly any homes from a millennium ago remain today, and hardly anyone would want to live in those that have survived. Furthermore, the land they sat on is often no longer valuable. In Biblical times, for example, Ephesus in western Turkey was a coastal city with magnificent buildings. But its once-valuable harbor has since silted, so that the city’s ruins are now miles from the sea.