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>"...less of the home-buying market is savvy enough in the "handyman" sense to tell the difference" True. I don't know how the market works in the US but in th
by dazc 11y ago
>"...less of the home-buying market is savvy enough in the "handyman" sense to tell the difference"
True. I don't know how the market works in the US but in the UK what typically happens is a developer owns the land but borrows short term money to build on it.
The incentive, therefore, is to complete the project as quickly and cheaply as possible. Residential houses are designed for ease of building not for quality.
A typical buyer will have a 90-95% mortgage and the completed house is signed off by a surveyor who is engaged by the mortgage provider. The only real concern is if the house will still be standing in 25 years time and nothing else. In effect it's a rubber stamping process.
The buyer is often too emotionally involved in the concept of owning a home to care less.
No sane person would complete the purchase of a new car if defects in build quality were so glaringly obvious but the same people do it with houses every day?
- jonnathanson 11y agoI think a key difference is that you drive the car everyday. Even if you have no clue about the inner workings of the car, you have a direct, frequent, operating relationship with it. You understand its basic principles and functionality in a hands-on way (literally). If unseen defects are present in a car, they'd reveal themselves to you in short order. The same cannot be said for houses. You live in a house everyday, but you don't have a true working or operating relationship with it unless you're very handy (which many home buyers these days are not). The car has a direct input/output operating cycle that you control; the house does not. It's harder to suss defects out because the house doesn't 'run' on them per se. You only learn about the defects when the house fails in one way or another. That may be two days into the inspection period, or it may be two years after closing.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoYeah, that's roughly how it works in the US. Pre-WW1, though, there was much more of "buy land and materials, build a house yourself" going on. Like, sometimes you'd basically clear the trees from a plot and use the lumber from that to build the house. That's what I meant by labor specialization - on the home-buying side, much fewer people can build a home or participate meaningfully in construction and remodeling.