The timeline might be long enough that people, especially landlords who don't have to live in the drafty, cold building or pay the fuel costs, won't do it without various carrots and sticks but that's totally different from a stranded asset.
Payback: Maybe over 30-50 years, but not over 20 or so - so for a lot of older people this isn't an economically viable proposition. Lower health costs? Where does that come from?
If the older people want to sell their home to someone else then they need to do the work. Again, unless that work costs more than their house, which to be clear, it doesn't, then it's not a stranded asset.
The only way you're doing that for a mere renovation is if it's a historically significant building.
(2) This 98m^2 detached house is listed at €104k to build: https://www.massa-haus.de/fertighaus/einfamilienhaus/lifesty...
This is the cheapest they do, yet a thing costing 10k/m^2 as you suggest would cost nearly a million.
You are looking at the cheapest thing to build. Not at all what a townhouse in a city would cost, for example. You cannot just remove all neighbouring walls etc., so really need to do quite extensive work when re-doing things. So, 300 sqm at 1k is a lot of money. When people bought the houses they were often cheap compared to today, so income hasn't grown with property value.
300 sqm also an unusually large house, from what I'm seeing.
If you are looking in Germany, some cities have more of them, some less (bit dependent on bomb damages and industrial history, I'd say).
I've just looked at the search results for immobilienscout24.de for Germany-wide "houses" for sale — scare-quotes because based on my other searches, quite a lot turned out to be apartments (individual or the whole building[1]) or hotels[2] — out of a total of 164,772 properties only 12,759 were at least 300 m^2, or 7.7%. Even eight percent cannot possibly be counted as "typical".
Of course, it is possible that the people entering info into immobilienscout24 are regularly not paying attention, as this "one room" property with "19 apartments" and "52 garages" suggests: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/146925779?referrer=R...
[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/143407389?referrer=R...
[2] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/147035140?referrer=R...
Anyway, even a smaller place clocking in at "only" 100k to get to a higher energy efficiency is a lot of money for some retired person, for example (and lending guidelines don't favor old people).
It's besides the point anyway, as I was talking about forcing people into difficult to finance things, give up on the place, or distressed selling. Whether that is 100k or 50k or 500k that causes that doesn't really matter at that point.
Ok, I can see that as a possibility, though not one I could either confirm or refute so I'm still uncomfortable with it.
> It's besides the point anyway, as I was talking about forcing people into difficult to finance things, give up on the place, or distressed selling. Whether that is 100k or 50k or 500k that causes that doesn't really matter at that point.
Echt?
To my understanding, a stranded asset is one that cannot be sold for a positive number.
Surely if the cost is significantly smaller than the thing — and I'd expect that if you've got a building that could be mistaken for the apartment building I'm in due to its size, it's valuation is in the millions of euros — then it's still not stranded.
For example, if it costs 300k to fix the whole building, but the whole building is valued at 3M — why wouldn't banks be willing to loan that for the improvements to allow it to be sold?
For a while after that, the government funded insulation top-ups in order to get an impressive sounding number of installs they could brag about, but those had much worse return on investment and that program was killed off a few years later. The thing is that we have an election coming up and a lot of the British press want the party that was in power back then and still is to lose, so they've pushed the narrative that cancelled insulation program would've achieved a lot more than it could've in reality and that people would've been saved from high energy bills if the government hadn't cancelled it for being too woke. There's been similar nonsense about other things like onshore wind for the same reason.
Anyway, at least in the UK the problem is that almost all of the easy, high-return on investment insulation upgrades have been done, and the only way to have a substantial impact is through ones that have payback times in the decades. If the era of zero interest rates is over permanently, that's basically equivalent to saying they'll never pay back the cost in many cases.
The UK government thinks that by 2020, there were still 8 million homes with lofts and no loft insulation:
> At the end of 2020, 14.3 million properties had cavity wall insulation (70 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 16.6 million had loft insulation (66 per cent of properties with a loft) and 772,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
edit: updated stats from 2022
> At the end of 2022, it is estimated that 14.8 million properties had cavity wall insulation (71 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 17.0 million had loft insulation (67 per cent of properties with a loft) and 805,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls)
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa...
When the subsidies are gone - and they will be after Russia's invasion of Ukraine - reality will catch up fast.