There are always hundreds of thousands of homes slated to be completed.
The problem is that for about ten years from 2008-2018 we UNDER BUILT based on normal requirements for a country of 330 million +/-.
Most housing industry economists state we need to build 1.5 million housing units/year to keep up with population growth.
Houses(single family & apartments/condos) on average on last 75 years. They burn down(CO), get flooded(hurricanes), and are demolished(Detroit), for one reason of another.
We do not build houses out of stone like they did in Europe where there are residences over 400 years old.
The oldest houses in the US are about 300 years old. Those have been rebuilt multiple times.
The inventory of homes for sale is extremely low. Especially in the areas where everyone wants to move to(SC, FL, NC, AZ, ID, TN, TX, CO, WA).
Properties in states like NY are becoming a discount to other states now. For example, my wife sent me a listing last week for a 180 acre farm in Alleghany county in NYS for $599K.
All real estate is local.
Generally speaking, nothing I disagree with there. Especially that last line. It’s why I moved to rural central Kentucky from Seattle when I did. All this real estate stuff mostly bypasses us. Prices go up - and down - but not by much.
City planning is a nightmare in the US. No one seems to want greater density, so the only alternative is sprawl, which creates its own problems with the amount of road surface, sewers, water lines, etc to be built and maintained vs the amount of tax money to pay for them. To help pay for them cities become addicted to developer money which leads to more sprawl, more infrastructure to build and maintain, and on and on.