>>60533070
Different areas are going to have different laws that interact with different markets to produce results. I come from one of the worst housing markets to buy into, Sydney, and its straight up bullshit expensive. Before I get into the taxes, you've got to understand that here there is a culture of thought that housing prices will never go down. They might dip for a year, but noone ever makes a serious loss. This belief means that people will borrow to the hilt, because their property will only accrue value, and after 30 years of paying off their mortgage, they'll come out in front. They're were also some tax changes 20 odd years ago now, that made it incredibly beneficial for investors. The combo of negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions mean that, as long as the property market is moving upwards, you can buy and sell and make a lot of money. And if the property market goes down? Well it doesnt because people see property as a bargain compared to 12 months earlier, and buy more. When you put both of these things together you have a lot of people caught up in housing, and the home owners with investment property's basically become a too big to fail and too big for government intervention. You also get the 'wealth' affect, so governments doubly dont want to interfere. The media sensationalises every interest rate change and always reports that low interest rates are good because of the large volume of private debt. Interest rates go down, people have more money to spend, housing prices go up. Interest rates go up, less money to spend, less demand to sell, less houses on the market, house prices go up? Yeah its bullshit

Know your market and understand the psychology of the city/state. My gut feel is the US is going to be a lot more like the Australian market over the next few years, however it is still location specific and its very likely to be a 2 speed housing market. Good houses in good locations are going to skyrocket, bad ones will stay flat