Anyone else struggling with house prices now vs a few years ago?

Buying Strategies
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So we’re house hunting right now, which is already stressful enough.

After years of renting, we finally found a house that actually works for us. We really need to buy something soon. We’ve got a bunch of pets, and let’s just say not all of our living arrangements have been totally above board lately. We know this won’t be our forever home since we’re still hoping to get back to having some land eventually, but finding the right property with acreage took us forever last time, and we just can’t keep renting indefinitely.

So we’re ready to put in an offer, but then I went down the rabbit hole of looking up the house’s history. Turns out it sold for 50% less just five years ago. FIFTY PERCENT. It’s making me feel physically ill, honestly. Here we are about to pay these inflated prices when we had to sell our own place that we got for practically nothing back in 2012 with those amazing low rates.

The whole market just feels completely unhinged.

The funny thing is, houses are definitely sitting around here longer than they used to. But this one hits every single thing on our wishlist, so we’re scared to wait and risk losing it for the sake of maybe saving a few thousand. Our realtor keeps saying it’s actually priced under market value, but it’s been sitting there for almost two weeks with zero offers. They’re even doing an open house this weekend.

I don’t really need advice or anything - just needed to get this frustration off my chest. Thanks for letting me vent.

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I dealt with this same frustration for years. I kept getting more and more bitter about it. Eventually I just pulled the trigger on a place and forced myself to stop obsessing over the numbers.

It’s funny because 5 years ago I was doing the exact same thing, looking back at prices from 2015 and feeling ripped off. My hope is that in another 5 years, I’ll be grateful I bought when I did instead of waiting even longer.

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I bought a starter home in 2001 and kept it as a rental property when I bought my current home in 2004. Since then, both have tripled in value. Although, the 2008 crash scared the hell out of me. Glad I kept both. I guess the lesson here, is that housing prices increase over time as long as you can weather the market dips.

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The prices are bonkers nowadays when you compare to a few years ago.. But there are still some incredible deals… I’m using Property Deal Finder which finds undervalued deals using machine learning just by entering in a zip code and radius..