Vacation Home Buying Fizzling. RV's too?

valhalla360 wrote:

way2roll wrote:
I worked as an analyst in the REO division of a large bank for years right around the big bubble. Maybe your geography is different but houses are not money pits. Statistically speaking, houses almost always are an appreciating asset. And in my neck of the woods, I've seen exponentially less used RV's for sale than the past 2 years.

Reality falls somewhere in the middle.

It's fun to talk about the little old couple who bought a $30k house in 1950 and the kids are selling it for $1million but that's really an unusual case and when you back calculate the annual return, it's not that great and it ignores all the costs that go into supporting a house for 70yrs.

If you are more typical (average duration of ownership is around 7yrs), the transaction costs of buying/selling typically eats up most if not all of the appreciation.

RVs are obviously worse as depreciating assets but houses are not the investments that the real estate industry promotes.

In terms of the market bubbles and the impact of rising interest rates, expect both to take a big hit as the Fed tries to get inflation under control after stoking the fires.

Don't confuse cost of ownership with the value of the asset. If a house one year sells for $100k and 2 years later sells for $150k, that's an increase in the absolute value of the home by $50k. Pretty much everything you buy has a cost of ownership. But an asset's value is it's value. And homes almost always increase in value. How you manage a sale becomes a factor of net proceeds but does not impact the value. And transaction costs of buying and selling are usually around 5-7%. Hardly eating the net profit. Cumulated annual property taxes are the biggest bite to a net income on most homes but again they don't change the value.

Rv's on the other hand, as you stated, are a depreciating asset. Most things are depreciating assets. Hardly anything outside of collectibles increase in value. But homes and land do.