If you can afford a holiday home, you have enough of an advantage already
Mate, I earn below median wage and I could buy a “holiday home”. This isn’t something fancy, it’s a shitty old house in the bush.
What I can’t afford is a house where jobs and people are, the city.
I think a lot of people hear holiday home and think like, tropical bungalow. A holiday home here in Sweden usually won’t have a sewage connection, and oftentimes not even running water. You’d have to use a potty and bring potable water yourself. You could get these pretty cheap so long as you’re in a position where you have some money left over after expenses.
A proper house will easily be 10x the amount a holiday home is.
There are fancier ones of course, that can basically double as a home. Anyone I know that has such a thing owns it as a family (as in grandparents, siblings, etc.).
I think people are picturing that, because that’s what’s been happening elsewhere; foreign investors using luxury real estate as an investment.
A holiday home is a second home. If you don’t have a home already and that’s what you purchase, it’s not your holiday home, it’s your only home.
They mention “the city”, I interpret it as the same situation as what used to be mine, owned my main residence in a city but not in THE city so prices are lower but most jobs are outside of the city I lived in, that allowed me to buy a second residence out in the woods for cheap, but I couldn’t live there full time (no water in winter, floor isn’t insulated).
Price of my condo: 85k
Price of my cottage: 50k
Bought in 2013 and 2020 respectively, both for sale for months and I’ve spent about 10k in each in renovations. If you can’t afford 135k in mortgage and 20k in renovations over 10 years then maybe it’s ok to just keep renting… Even at the price the condo sold at this year (170k) that’s 220k + 10k over 3 years for a home and a holiday home, perfectly reasonable for a couple.
Edit: Funny how people downvote when people tell them that, yeah, it’s still possible to find affordable housing…
Where are you? The article is about Australia. In Sydney, you probably wouldn’t have seen the prices you mention since at least the 1980s.
This Australian Property price update might be useful for information purposes. The median Sydney dwelling is AUD$1.1M or about USD$720,000. The median regional dwelling (ie outside of Sydney) is over AUD$700k, so about USD$460,000.
Yes, we are fucked.
Canada, our money has about the same value and median house value in Toronto (our most populous city) is CAD1.1M
656k median house price in Canada as a whole.
The condo I used to own is located about 20 minutes from the downtown area of the country’s capital (Ottawa), the whole region has about 1.7m in population, the cottage is about an hour away from there.
What’s funny is that when I was telling my younger colleagues to do like I did and use that as a stepping stone to eventually buy something better, the reaction was always the same, no purchase unless it’s a single family house… And then they watched from their parents’ place/apartment as the market went crazy and they could have made 50k over a couple of years by buying a cheap condo before the pandemic instead of insisting on starting with a house and if that hadn’t happened they could have just paid their mortgage and used that as a savings account instead of paying rent…
