houses are no longer homes but assets, and every street is Wall Street

Invest in a rental home for $100/share

Imagine if you could invest $100 in a home of your own, at a reasonable multiple of your annual salary. Time was, you could buy a home for about 10,000 working hours, or 5 times your annual salary. Not really possible anymore but by all means, go off about the sanctity of single family assets homes.

At a $15 minimum wage, that’s $30,000 a year, so there should be $300,000 homes — either freestanding or some kind of terrace/rowhouse or even a flat or apartment. Turns out even Seattle has houses that are valued at $300,000 but the land under them — something no one needs to buy — is worth more than the house.

“Arrived is entirely focused on single-family homes, which we are very bullish on during the next 10 years,” Chouza said. “As new home construction has not and will likely not keep up with the growing demand, we believe there are strong appreciation trends over the next decade.”

New home construction hasn’t kept up because land values encourage holding and discourage development: if the cost to hold an appreciating asset is 1% of its value, why would you develop it and pay tax on the development? And what do you bet the VCs and other investors in housing as an asset will fight any move to force land into productive use through ground rent or land tax? And they can count on local homeowners to go along, even as there is no evidence that development lowers existing property values and plenty that it raises values of nearby properties.

“While single family homes sometimes can go through short-term cycles, the asset class has proven to be incredibly resilient and has shown consistent upward movement for the past 100 years,” Chouza added.

“The asset class”…these are homes for families, not assets, but this is where late stage capitalism has brought us, to a place where everything is for rent, not for sale, where the media — music, books, movies — are a service, where you hope that Uber/Lyft can get you where you need to go.

Turns out this was foretold…Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a “paid-for” experience. It’s all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After several hundred years as the dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from any we have known.

The Transactional Age, where you can’t do anything without an exchange, but where your own value is undercut by the same entities who own what you need.