People Who Don’t Buy in the Next Five Years Will Likely Never Own a Home
The current real estate slump is our last chance before trillion-dollar landlords take over
I’m originally from Canada — a wretched, culture-free, genocidal, planet-poisoning, child-abusing, anti-democracy filled with house-obsessed shopaholics who carry the highest household debt loads on earth.
The average house price where over half of Canadians live (commutable Vancouver and commutable Toronto) is an absurd $1+ million.
So naturally, Canada’s real estate pyramid scheme participants are currently freaking out that the markets are cooling in the direction of affordability.
Everyone is chattering about how low prices could go, how long they’ll stay down, and when they’ll start soaring toward the moon again.
Yesterday on Twitter, I gave my friends some context:
Canadian real estate crashes typically take 20–60% off the peak over 3–6 years, then return to the previous peak over the next 4–6 years.
In other words, Canadian house prices never get anywhere near real value, but that’s what happens when you engineer your nation like a pyramid scheme.
I went on to say that we should expect this timeline to shorten in the years ahead.
Why?
Because trillion-dollar private equity firms are quicker to recover from market resets than devastated families, and they’re now fueling record demand for houses so they can rent-trap humanity.
You thought American corporations buying 28% of homes and 23% of trailer parks this first quarter was bad? Wait until prices are down 30+%, no one can afford to buy because of high interest rates, and investors go shopping. We can’t build our way out of corporate control. It’ll be more like some Canadian cities, where up to 90% of houses sold are monopolized by investors.
So:
Assume no more than three down years.
Assume the bottom won’t go nearly as low as it should.
Assume the recovery will be much quicker than in the past.
Assume you will be outbid by trillionaire cash bidders.
But most of all, assume that this is the last chance the working class will have to own a home in our generation. The reality is that thanks to parasitic financialization, the average house will cost $10 million in our lifetime and homeownership will be out of reach of nearly everyone you know.
Allowing rent-trapping will go down as one of the biggest follies of the twenty-first century, but that’s where most of humanity will find itself — paying crushingly more in rent than they would’ve paid to own in a non-financialized housing market.
With that in mind, what should we do in the next 1–4 years?
Buy if you can
[Obviously, nothing I say is financial advice, blah blah blah. You’re all adults with brains.]
When things cool off, buy a home if you want to, and can afford to do so.
Buy with friends or family if that’s what it takes.
Don’t be a loser and try to time the absolute bottom — just try to find something of relative value that you can happily enjoy for the rest of your lives as a real home and not an investment.
Even though getting a mortgage is a massive and dangerous ripoff, rents will continue to outpace inflation and it will kill you in the long run.
Help others escape from land-lorders
When things cool off, do whatever you can to help your friends and loved ones buy houses:
Give them a chunk for their downpayment.
Lend them money interest-free.
Hold their mortgage or a piece of their mortgage.
Help them renovate.
Crowdfund entire home purchases for worthies
Do what you can.
Remember, if your friends can’t get into the market on this down round, there’s a strong chance they’ll be priced out for decades if not forever, and will burn the rest of their lives trying to stay sheltered while enriching land-lorders. This brave new world will ruin their lives, and it will take a toll on your relationship.
A quick personal story
My wife and I recently helped a friend in Ghana. She and her husband have been rent-trapped for their entire adult lives, forking over the majority of their legitimately hard-earned income to a parasite land-lorder.
So we loaned her enough money, interest-free, to build a home from which they can run their business. For the cost of me losing ~15% of that money’s purchasing power due to purposeful theft by inflation, my friend gains freedom from a vampire monopolist and a chance to retain family wealth, educate her kids, grow her business, and make a real contribution in this world. We’re all better for it.
Do the right thing
You cannot call yourself a good person, a moral person, a kind person, a nice person, a person of faith, or a pro-human person if you continue to profit from rent-seeking.
Open your portfolio and divest of all real estate stocks.
Ditch vampirical REITs.
Shut down your community-destroying Airbnb.
Sell all of your rental properties and second homes to owner-occupiers for whatever you have into them. This literally costs you nothing and secures a land-lorder-free future for real working contributors.
If you own land, do what you can to build more affordable owner-occupied houses, or sub-divide the land and sell it affordably to young families so they can have a decent shot at a good life.
Stop voting for corporatists
If you vote for Democrats or Republicans in America, Liberals/NDP/Cons in Canada, or Labour/Cons/LibDem in the UK, you are not a serious person.
Or rather, you are not serious about the well-being of your nation.
We need to elect “radical” (read: moral) servant-hearted politicians who work for living people, not anti-human corporations.
People who will introduce a Georgist land value tax to destroy speculators
People who will introduce a 100% capital gains tax to drive parasites out of human shelter
People who will ban Airbnb to save communities.
People who will ban interest to despoil the non-contributing rich.
People who will declare affordable shelter an unconditional human right.
Because realistically, unless American/Canadian/British homeowners magically decide to start electing non-corporatists, institutional land-lorders will dominate housing for the rest of our lives.
The beginning of the end
But of course, unless hundreds of millions of people read this article and truly take it to heart, none of this will happen on a large enough scale.
High interest rates will keep most people from buying.
Most people are too broke or too stingy to help others.
Most people won’t do the right thing and stop exploiting others.
Certainly no majority will stop voting for corporatists.
That’s what happens when you build an every-man-for-himself-survival-of-the-fittest-dog-eat-dog hyper-individualist civilization.
We’re all alone on the housing front, up against the biggest enemy of affordable housing in the history of human shelter.
So do what you can to get out of rent-serfdom and into homeownership.
The next ~1–4 years will be the difference between wasting your life on enriching parasites or retaining some wealth so you can make a real difference in the world.
And you can bet the extractors don’t want the latter.