This is untrue in both the literal and figurative senses. In the literal sense, real estate isn't just land, other properties of land, such as mineral or air rights, can also be created, bought, and sold. You can build up and sell condominiums. You can build down. You can dredge land out of the ocean. Eventually you'll be able to build out in space.
In the figurative sense, people make this claim to assert that real estate is becoming rare, and therefore intrinsically valuable. While certain markets definitely are this way, like NYC penthouses, the asset class as a whole is much like it's brethren in this regard. Value is in the eye of the beholder, trends develop rapidly and can bolster or devalue individual properties at breathtaking rates.
Specifically, I'm wondering why there are no cheap modular houses (like in movie ex machina). Houses that are mass produced, cheap and relatively easy to ship and assemble but configurable.
Elio motors is offering a small 84MPG vehicle for $6,800. 30 year old Volkswagen Westfalia Campers maintain a high resale value to this very day. Why are all mobile homes so huge? How much money do people spend on rent, leases, mortgages, and buying homes?
I'm sure college students would love a compact mobile home vehicle. Developing countries would likely eat such a thing up.
The CEO of Zappos lives in a trailer park of Airstream trailers and Tumbleweed tiny mobile houses with a shared kitchen, living room and other common areas designed to encourage a true neighborhood / community.
Or just consider a house as infrastructure.
Real estate is assumed to be limited, but that's mostly
the result of nimbyism and the gaming of developments
sold off on the real estate market as "investments". The
whole trend of gentrification will likely play out in
less expensive regions of North America and developing
countries, and presumably there will be large dense
affordable housing somewhere someday and these areas tend
to be fertile for creative businesses and cultural
experimentation. New York is long stagnate, and it's
amazing how much San Fransisco suffers from real estate
leaching off of the working population and tech economy.
I see what you did there... Now lets try that on my wife.
You're looking at one of the oldest, most capital-intensive markets in existence. It's practically the polar opposite of technology. Not a whole lot startups can really do.
> Specifically, I'm wondering why there are no cheap modular houses (like in movie ex machina). Houses that are mass produced, cheap and relatively easy to ship and assemble but configurable.
Well, that's easy to answer. In most real estate transactions, the cost of the underlying land is going to be the dominant factor, the house is just a value-add, the equivalent of buying a soda with your meal.
Modular houses themselves are at a disadvantage because it's not the cheapest way to put homes on land. Modern stick-framed houses are so cheap to put up these days that once you factor in the R&D, transportation and specialized installation costs, factory-built modular homes are at a severe disadvantage. Construction workers are literally everywhere, the labor is so cheap that it's practically a non-factor.
Also, it's easy to over-build. If developers create a glut, nobody's going to make money for a long time. Prices don't really come down during a glut because the developer would rather let the house sit than sell at a loss. So you get a lot of empty housing stock sitting around.
Well, prefab homes are a thing and they even use the word 'modular' liberally http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/prefab-lives... mobile homes are a thing, and are fairly dominant in low-income areas (which kinda sorta impacts the market acceptance of prefab homes). But no one has quite cracked the prefab for multi-family market.
Multifamily and prefab.
That's really only common in desirable cities with older housing stock.
A land to total value ratio is considered typical-to-high at 30%. Anything more than that gets extra scrutiny from lenders, who don't want to write residential-class loans on minimally-improved properties.
My understanding is that it's the internals (plumbing, gas lines, heating and A/C, natural gas lines, fireplaces and chimneys) that are hard to modularize.
There's an interesting article by a guy who wrote an entire book on prefab housing http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/prefab-lives...
I've been spending some time recently thinking about alternative options to the rent/buy dichotomy.
Buying a house is in this weird category of quasi-investment that is difficult to offset. In no other market do we encourage consumers to take on debt when making an investment in a commodity. Most consumers are not able to hedge this risk so fluctuations in the housing market can wipe people out and ruin lives.
Renting a house is a whole different problem. The rental market can be very discriminatory, especially against people with poor credit. The friction and lack of information in the rental market prevents many renters from being able price in more than a couple of variables (usually just location and size). The upside of this is that there if little incentive to make certain types of improvements (especially improvements that decrease the utility costs)
It seems that there should be a better way to deal with housing that protects individuals against the risk of mortgages and property bubbles while still aligning the interests of home-owner and home-user.
If 432 Park Ave taught us anything it's that one can always build up.
For this reason, it being finite, I wish the US government would set some restrictions on allowing business and foreign investments to purchase residential real estate. It is hard enough (San Francisco seems like a large part of the rest of the US on steroids) for working people to purchase these days...having empty homes bought by non-residents just sit waiting until the prices are forced (due to said) to rise is only going to exacerbate the situation.