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Comment by xur17 | Hacker News Reader

> Coincidently I have been seeing a lot of fully furnished units coming on the market which I assume were former Airbnbs.

I've been noticing this as well (I can still find some of them on Airbnb actually).

I'm currently in the market for a house, but wondering if waiting a year might be a wise move..

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Well if you think this is going to be a downturn, you should look at how other downturns in housing unfolded. Usually, house prices take a while to fall once things get bad. Usually, you start to see a lot of deals and properties selling way under asking before average listing prices drop. If we are going to get to that point, it certainly doesn't appear to have happened yet.

I'm starting to see this - of the 8 or so houses sold in Los Altos over the last month, one was 5% under asking and the other was 18% under asking. It's still pretty rare though.

More interesting is the huge hit to the volume of sales. Mountain View was turning over about 8 houses/month before COVID, but for each of the last 2 months, only 4 houses have sold, and 5 in March.

I think it'll be a while, and depend upon how the reopening goes, whether we get layoffs at major tech companies, and whether remote work becomes common.

If you're staying in the same market and you already own, then it doesn't matter much. What matters more is that your other investments are relatively outperforming the house (likely already true because of the Fed's money printer).

If you don't already own, waiting for a drop might be wise, but if you're going to sell stock to do it, you might wanna do it now. I'm looking at trading up to a new place right now and that's my plan.

If you're moving up in home value, it may be worth taking the loss on a smaller home to get a good price on a bigger on.

> if you're going to sell stock to do it, you might wanna do it now

Might be a wise move, but the current interest rates make it hard to pass up a mortgage..

Oh I'm assuming a mortgage is still involved. Buying a house purely with cash is a stupid move when the fed is handing out free money. Debt is a great tool if you use it correctly.

Doesn't "the Fed's money printer" inflate housing just as much as other assets?

Not without some substantial delay. The stock market and the housing market are definitely correlated, but not perfectly so.

With a lag, and it really depends on the area and how many people benefit from money printing. If the scheme is QE like in europe, the housing prices will not gain as much as the market prices in low to middle-class area.

I'm waiting a year, in the hopes that some 700k-range homes start popping up that aren't 100% dumpster fires.

I'm in the same boat and have decided to wait. It's really impossible to know though. Luckily I'm ok with staying in my rental for the time being.

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