On 1/17/2020 7:14 PM, news18 wrote:

snip

How many of your original neighbours are still there?

A lot. And often adult children take over their parents' house.

When a house in your street sells for 70+ times what you paid for it, the
incentive is hight to sell up. Tempered only by the need to buy somewhere
else.

That is a huge amount of tempering. Unless you are willing to leave the
area, there is no upside in selling because anything you buy will be
just as costly. So most people stay. We have neighbors on our street who
could sell their houses for 100x what they paid when the house was new.
But they will stay in their house until the end, unless health concerns
make that impossible. The fact that they'd be better off moving to a
less expensive city, and having more money for their retirement, is
immaterial to many of them. Often the houses deteriorate because they
can't afford maintenance and non-profit organizations will come in to do
basic maintenance.

For seniors, it makes much more financial sense to rent out their home
and move somewhere else than to sell.

There are some "improvements" that just are not. When we purchased
current place, we had to change real estate agents a number of times as
they just would not take the instruction that we did NOT want a swimming
pool, jackuzi, sauna, etc, etc.

We really didn't want a pool. But a lot of houses in our city had had
pools added at some point. Many people just removed them. Even though
pool removal is costly, around $10,000 to $15,000, that is not a
significant amount on a house in this area. We kept our pool. I wanted
to take it out. My wife likes it. I maintain it. It is costly to
maintain mainly because of the electricity cost for the pump, but with
our solar panels our electricity usage from the grid is minimal (well
other than the $18K to install all those solar panels). It doesn't
require much water to offset evaporation, but doing an empty/refill
every 5 to 6 years is very costly.