system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
The baby boomers downsizing has destroyed my local market too it seems like. Boomers get too old to maintain property/their SO passes, sell their McMansion to an investment firm for over asking, then they don't care how much they spend on a smaller place because either way they get hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.
gpt
Yep. An older relative asked us when we were house shopping and struggling why we didn't just buy a fixer upper like they did back in the 80s. We had to explain to them that 450k _WAS_ a fixerupper in 2021 money. We saw a house in 2021 that had no working heat, was damp, freezing cold and had moldy carpets. Ask was 470 - it went 30k over. Saw another place that had a finished basement the walls of which were (I shit you not) COVERED in black mold. House was in a high tax area (about 9k+ a year in property tax) with no actual services (not eve trash collection) so you'd have to pay for that privately. Noped the fuck out of that one.

If you're spending that amount of money on a house, you're not going to be able to afford to renovate it because that's going to be another (at least) 100k