>"...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?

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

Yup. When Hurricane Andrew blew through South Florida in 1992, homes in the direct path that were built prior to modern building standards survived, while more modern homes (I think post-1980) were unlivable (or totally gone, depending on the area).

Part of that was declining building standards (go too long between hurricanes and yes, people get complacent).

But another aspect, I think, is a shift in home ownership---we no longer "own" a home for an extended period of time (average length of owning a home in the US is seven years). Yes, my grandparents eventually paid off their mortgages, but nowadays I think that's pretty rare. Why buy quality when you aren't going to own for very long?

I've heard this hypothesis before, but I don't think frequent moving is the correct explanation. After all, moving out of a house means moving into another one. Furthermore, Europeans today continue to build with brick and other masonry and, if I were to guess, relocate at rates that are comparable enough to those in the US. The more likely explanation has to do with American culture. Not only do Americans value quantity relative to quality to a higher degree than Europeans, but when American land was being settled, it was a. heavily wooded and b. occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when stone and brick urban fortifications were being torn down in Europe. By contract, Europe was by this time heavily deforested (e.g., England imported its wood from countries such as Poland to meet the needs of its growing navy).

The theory of ownership in the Washington area, as explained by a realtor at the end of the 1980s, but probably commonly held for 15 or 20 years before that, was that you bought, held for a few years to get back your closing costs and let the property appreciate some, then moved on to something more expensive. One can see why a realtor might think well of this idea.

The one thing I will say for modern houses is that the wiring will generally be better and with outlets better spaced. They might be better insulated. But my goodness, the quality of the workmanship and often materials. We watched a house going up next to us, and had to think that big is a lot cheaper than good.