The idea that 40 years and this house cost than 10x more?
I know there’s a lot of other factors. I’m just… Sigh.
Was there even a house there in 1986? The price difference would make a lot of sense if you’re comparing an empty lot to a fully improved one that used to be in the middle of nowhere and is now surrounded by a fully developed neighborhood.
Yeah, without context OP’s example is meaningless. I could grab property records from Detroit that show the exact opposite of what is implied here.
That’s a really good question! Is there a way to look that up?
I was looking at houses in my neighborhood on Zillow and the house was gorgeous, but I rolled my eyes when I saw the old rates.
Depends on the effort your willing to go to… if you walk down to town hall with at least $10 in your wallet, your likely to walk away with record duplicates to answer the question definitively…
Go to the register of deeds and look for some kind of mortgage around 1986 for an amount other than the lot.
On Zillow it usually says when the house was built. Are the other replies in jest? In 2024, to go somewhere physically, to look this up?
Exactly this. You can still find lots that cheap still in parts of the US and plop a 800k house on top of them. Then boom $800k estate.
Possibly also a house in a resource town that’s gone boom bust boom. Some of those had people dropping keys and walking away from mortgages when all the jobs dried up, then things get crazy when a new mine etc opens and there’s high-paid labor all looking for a place to live
There is like a $215k premium over inflation, so without knowing anything else about the house, that is crazy.
If it had a big plot and was in a low development area that has grown into a high demand area and was drastically modernized, I could see the current price make some sense. It was sold for like 3x the median home price in '68, so I imagine it is over 3k sqft or has a big plot.
Even considering the variables, it is hard to justify over a $150k premium.
In Spokane Washington, my grandmother purchased a house for my mom that was like $35k in 1984. Similar houses in the area are about $350k right now.
So yeah that’s some stupid inflation
I purchased a historical house in Spokane 2019 for almost $500k and it’s suggested sale price is over $800k now. Stupid.
I think my home in oregon has appreciated $300k in the last 5 years, and realistically I could probably hold out for another $300k over that based on location and improvements. It’s ridiculous, and I say that as a beneficiary of all this insanity.
As others in this thread have mentioned: there are a lot of factors that go into a property’s value especially over that timeframe. Hell parcels could’ve been combined for all we know. But overall housing saw a general slow crawl of increased value, then volatility in 2009 followed by inflation really taking off 2017ish. My house doubled in value from 2019 to 2022.
But if we are assuming those costs are 40 years mostly unchanged conditions? That is still major increase in value. You see that kind of inflation in value if the land is in high demand. If its near a city center that has seen growth and devlopment? Easy increase in price.
Another factor are once remote areas that has seen major developments. Out here in PNW there are a lot of old developments on lakefronts that have exploded in value because they got a walmart within an hours drive and now an internet connection decent enough to enable teleworking.
This could be my dad’s house. In Hillsboro right around that time he paid 60k. Single family home with a huge lot.
My grandmother’s house, which was in a VERY nice, very high class neighborhood, was $20k back in the early 80s. Today, the area is destroyed and had become another run down suburb near Detroit. It’s dangerous to live in, but that house is still $160k.
WWII saw the end of almost 500k American lives, but the population of the country still increased. There will always be more people, but there will never be more Earth.
My current home that I bought a few years ago I bought for 375k in Oregon. I looked up the history for it, and it sold back in 1991 for 78k. I hate the world we live in now.
