You will either be amused or horrified by my discovery of the documents leading to the original sale of my mother’s house. My mom & dad bought this place in 1976, the first and only home they would own, for this amazing price:
That’s right $28,990, and they bought it with a $500 down payment. My father’s income at that time was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of $10K, so it was a bit of a stretch for them.
This is the same house I’m selling for $435K now.
The housing market is stark raving nuts. Boomers had it relatively easy.
My mom & dad bought the house I grew up in for 35k in 1974. It was south of Hillsboro, Oregon — an area that would later be suburbs of Portland, but when the house was bought was still accessed by a gravel road with a large wheat field behind us. (The areas along the access street to our home, which was at the end and would eventually be a paved cul-de-sac, were already zoned to be built up into a suburb, but it wasn’t filled in yet, and it wouldn’t be til high school that the wheat field behind us got sold off to become a subdivision, so I was at the boundary between suburbs and rural land almost that whole time — the best description back then would have been “exurbs” but it’s a word not familiar to most people.)
It was a little more expensive than your parent’s house, purchased a couple years later, but our house was pretty big and it was new construction, so…? Yeah. The price there doesn’t exactly surprise me. Within a couple years and within 25%. Totally a reasonable variance for location & new construction, etc.
What’s disgusting to me is that I bought a house for $125k in Portland proper in 2004 and the same house today is worth well over 400k.
WTF?
In inflation-adjusted terms, $28,990 in 1976 would be equivalent to about $161,000 today.
However, if that $28,990 had been invested in the stock market and seen average returns, it would be worth $5.9 million today in 2024 dollars.
my wee condo in trailer park land, 320k with years of neglected work to do on it. less square footage than my last apartment.
As a millennial I’m going to need this concept of “buying” property explained to me. That can’t have been a thing, can it?