5 ms·

I'm always a bit amused at this sort of article. At it's heart it is an attempt by someone who makes their living selling a thing (real estate) to instill a si

I'm always a bit amused at this sort of article. At it's heart it is an attempt by someone who makes their living selling a thing (real estate) to instill a since of FOMO in order to motivate you to buy something now rather than perhaps later. You can't really fault them, it does tend to work. I happen to live in the "red hot" Bay Area and twice wince I've been living in my house its value has gone DOWN year over year rather than up. I have never considered it an "investment", rather it is a fixed cost that I have to pay to live indoors. My parents live in Las Vegas, and that housing market, which has been largely unconstrained, demonstrated exactly what that means. Houses in Vegas for a long time depreciated after you bought them, just like cars. They did that because there was so much new housing being built that you could buy a "new" house for the same price as a "used" house. Guess what, people opted for "new" and used houses needed to sell at a discount if they wanted to sell. One of the truisms for years was the value of a house was intimately tied to its location. This because it was close to jobs, or schools or what not. It is my hope that remote work really takes hold and you can work just as reasonably in a $100,000 house in Missouri as you can in a million dollar house in the Bay Area. That would really create some downward pressure on prices because of simple market dynamics.

bombcar 5y ago
Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out! Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal!
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  >Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out! Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal! Hurry up and buy now, in a few months a new crisis can come and we'll lose the opportunity to make nice profits.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  Establishing a sense of urgency has always been a common sales tactic.
Noumenon72 5y ago
Having occasional down years doesn't mean something is not red hot or not an investment. It's all about the expected total return.
emodendroket 5y ago
The chief effect of remote work appears to be putting upward pressure on less desirable markets, not downward pressure on more desirable ones. I don't really think they have to do much to goose the market at the moment either.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but will point out that if demand isn't being met in an area, pricing changes won't happen until it is. So there is a LOT of demand for houses in the bay area (for example) that is unmet and people with salaries to pay the really high prices. As people move out it frees up real estate which should, as a trailing indicator, lead to lower prices. It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    > It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves. Buy during crisis when no one wants a particular asset, sell after the crisis when it becomes hot. Rinse and repeat.
    - marvin 5y ago
      Well, if the crisis ever ends. Any crisis can in principle lead to a new Detroit, with 40 years of depressed asset values. Assuming that a crash is just a temporary decline requires a selective memory.
      - tadfisher 5y ago
        In the meantime, you own a home. You know, a place to reside and keep your stuff.
    - smegma2 5y ago
      It's interesting that you seem to think this is a bad thing. If you can't buy a house when no one wants one, when do you consider it permissible to buy one?
bbarn 5y ago
Remote work doesn't scale to society. It's a thing mostly privileged, educated, or experienced people are capable of. At some point, someone has to make or do something physical. With very few exceptions, like entertainment, all of our remote jobs eventually tie in to some good being produced. Even pure services jobs ultimately feed some machine that produces physical products, and those will always need to have access to cheap labor and good shipping lanes to succeed. You can be a cloud engineer, but the people buying cloud services are eventually selling something to people making things. The impact so far has been more people with more money getting to live in places where their previously "city" salaries give them an edge in cheaper areas. It's also been that some companies have started to adjust salaries for remote work downwards, both of which will flatten out the temporary advantage being a remote worker brings to society. The only answer is basically socialism, and most of us (myself included) don't like that answer because human nature is to compete.
- acdha 5y ago
  It's true that remote work isn't compatible with every job but I think it'll have more of an impact than you're predicting because those jobs don't all have to be in the same places as they have been historically. We've seen an over-concentration in certain areas where existing major businesses drove demand up stratospherically in places like NYC, SF, etc. I'd predict that remote work will spread things out more by making it more viable to make living decisions based on things like proximity to family or lifestyle amenities which would be completely inconsistent with being in the office in Manhattan at 8:30am every day. That should be good for a lot of those service industry jobs in smaller regional cities where the cost of living is much lower. Socialism is an interesting angle because that term has a lot of different meanings and it's loaded in the U.S. because Americans try to use it as synonym for communism, despite many counter examples. I wouldn't, for example, consider Europe or Canada devoid of competition and those examples show how much money we could be saving with more socialist policies in ways which actually improve competition. For example, unlinking health coverage from employment removes a significant risk for small businesses, improves job market competition, and significantly lowers one of the factors driving prices up. Similarly, subsidizing childcare both helps parents work — with costs in the $20-30K range per child there are a lot of lower-income people who could work but are unable to make the finances work. I'd prefer to pay that out of general tax revenue than expect every coffeeshop to be able to pay baristas that much more since that's a big expense to spread over a small pool of workers.

bombcar 5y ago

Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out! Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal!

DeathArrow 5y ago
>Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out! Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal! Hurry up and buy now, in a few months a new crisis can come and we'll lose the opportunity to make nice profits.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
Establishing a sense of urgency has always been a common sales tactic.

Noumenon72 5y ago

Having occasional down years doesn't mean something is not red hot or not an investment. It's all about the expected total return.

emodendroket 5y ago

The chief effect of remote work appears to be putting upward pressure on less desirable markets, not downward pressure on more desirable ones. I don't really think they have to do much to goose the market at the moment either.

ChuckMcM 5y ago
I don't disagree, but will point out that if demand isn't being met in an area, pricing changes won't happen until it is. So there is a LOT of demand for houses in the bay area (for example) that is unmet and people with salaries to pay the really high prices. As people move out it frees up real estate which should, as a trailing indicator, lead to lower prices. It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  > It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves. Buy during crisis when no one wants a particular asset, sell after the crisis when it becomes hot. Rinse and repeat.
  - marvin 5y ago
    Well, if the crisis ever ends. Any crisis can in principle lead to a new Detroit, with 40 years of depressed asset values. Assuming that a crash is just a temporary decline requires a selective memory.
    - tadfisher 5y ago
      In the meantime, you own a home. You know, a place to reside and keep your stuff.
  - smegma2 5y ago
    It's interesting that you seem to think this is a bad thing. If you can't buy a house when no one wants one, when do you consider it permissible to buy one?

bbarn 5y ago

Remote work doesn't scale to society. It's a thing mostly privileged, educated, or experienced people are capable of. At some point, someone has to make or do something physical. With very few exceptions, like entertainment, all of our remote jobs eventually tie in to some good being produced. Even pure services jobs ultimately feed some machine that produces physical products, and those will always need to have access to cheap labor and good shipping lanes to succeed. You can be a cloud engineer, but the people buying cloud services are eventually selling something to people making things. The impact so far has been more people with more money getting to live in places where their previously "city" salaries give them an edge in cheaper areas. It's also been that some companies have started to adjust salaries for remote work downwards, both of which will flatten out the temporary advantage being a remote worker brings to society. The only answer is basically socialism, and most of us (myself included) don't like that answer because human nature is to compete.

acdha 5y ago
It's true that remote work isn't compatible with every job but I think it'll have more of an impact than you're predicting because those jobs don't all have to be in the same places as they have been historically. We've seen an over-concentration in certain areas where existing major businesses drove demand up stratospherically in places like NYC, SF, etc. I'd predict that remote work will spread things out more by making it more viable to make living decisions based on things like proximity to family or lifestyle amenities which would be completely inconsistent with being in the office in Manhattan at 8:30am every day. That should be good for a lot of those service industry jobs in smaller regional cities where the cost of living is much lower. Socialism is an interesting angle because that term has a lot of different meanings and it's loaded in the U.S. because Americans try to use it as synonym for communism, despite many counter examples. I wouldn't, for example, consider Europe or Canada devoid of competition and those examples show how much money we could be saving with more socialist policies in ways which actually improve competition. For example, unlinking health coverage from employment removes a significant risk for small businesses, improves job market competition, and significantly lowers one of the factors driving prices up. Similarly, subsidizing childcare both helps parents work — with costs in the $20-30K range per child there are a lot of lower-income people who could work but are unable to make the finances work. I'd prefer to pay that out of general tax revenue than expect every coffeeshop to be able to pay baristas that much more since that's a big expense to spread over a small pool of workers.