Cars and houses have different useful lives, but neither is forever.. and neither can get by without significant maintenance cost after a certain point. I thin

Cars and houses have different useful lives, but neither is forever.. and neither can get by without significant maintenance cost after a certain point. I think we will see more baby boomer houses go on the market which are near full teardown as the remaining value is the land only. Not sure if you've lived in wood framed SFH, but stuff built in the 40s-70s really shows its age now. Lots of $10k-50k costs that start to creep in as you need to replace roof every 10-20 years, wooden siding/shingles (10-20 years), all the windows (20 years?), boiler/furnace (20 years), central air (20 years maybe), etc. If you need to replace hardwood flooring could be $20k. My parents have well water and even though it's treated, after 50 years if you were doing a gut renovation you'd probably replace all the pipes. Could switch to city water but thats about $50k. The masonry on their chimney just cracked and a baseball sized chunk fell on the deck, I dunno $5k. Speaking of the deck, it needs to be torn down and replaced.. $10-20k. Did I mention their home is worth like $300k on Zillow? These things don't go all at once, but they start to hit more and more often past a certain point. And this is before the era of particleboard pre-fab construction which I'd imagine will breakdown faster.