News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by Clubber on Saturday December 02, 2017 @01:24AM (#15830540)
Houses are usually based on what houses in the area sell for. So if you own a $200K house and a builder buys your neighbor's house and demos it, then replaces it with 3 cheaper houses @ $100K, the average goes way down.

It's more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by smsm42 on Saturday December 02, 2017 @01:39AM (#15830594)
> Houses are usually based on what houses in the area sell for.

I think it's more complicated than that - certainly $100K houses would not be the same size and features as $200K one, and when determining the price estimates, this is usually taken into account - 1bd/1br is not the same as 3bd/3br.

Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by Clubber on Saturday December 02, 2017 @02:13AM (#15830702)
It is more complicated, like I said. It's not a linear valuation, meaning a 1500 sq. foot house won't be 1/2 the cost as a 3000 sq. foot house in the same neighborhood, but it will be lower and push down the average home value.

If houses in a neighborhood were sold strictly on a price / sq. foot basis, there probably wouldn't be much devaluation, in fact you would probably get an increase valuation based the costs incurred to just build a house without regards to sq footage. (meaning the first $125K is the first 1000 sq feet and the 2nd 1000 is only $75K more.

Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by smsm42 on Saturday December 02, 2017 @02:35AM (#15830772)
> meaning a 1500 sq. foot house won't be 1/2 the cost as a 3000 sq. foot house in the same neighborhood, but it will be lower and push down the average home value.

Average home value is largely meaningless if you are averaging substantially different houses. It only has meaning if we're talking about heterogeneous neighborhood or about something like a large area in rough comparison with another large area. Well, maybe not entirely meaningless as you still can get rough indicator of "price level", but useless in comparing the effect of this or that measure. It's like the reverse of the joke when Bill Gates walks into a pub and average income of everybody in the pub doubles. May be technically true but not a useful measure of anything.

Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by infinite8s on Saturday December 02, 2017 @05:13PM (#15834466)
If Bill Gates walks into a bar the average person in the bar is now a billionaire (assuming about a moderately sized bar with 50 people in it).
Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by TheCoelacanth on Saturday December 02, 2017 @05:05PM (#15834409)
> Bill Gates walks into a pub and average income of everybody in the pub doubles

That must be a really big pub or have started out with some very rich people in it to have only doubled.

Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by smsm42 on Sunday December 03, 2017 @01:56AM (#15836377)
Well he wouldn't go to just any pub...
Re:The Great American Single-Family Home Problem by MarchHare on Saturday December 02, 2017 @06:36AM (#15831476)
Sounds like your lot just went up ~100k for free?