I’m a handyman. New homes are trash. Contractor grade fixtures that will need to be replaced. Everything is as cheap as possible. “Let’s put the water heater in the attic so once it fails it will destroy everything under it.” Let’s use the push to shut-off water lines that will break the moment you decide you want to replace that crap faucet."

Once you live in you will want to spend upwards of 10% of the house value fixing all the crap that the builders did. Get yourself a high end inspector to go through the house with a fine tooth comb and they will find all kinds of code compliance issues that the builders will be liable for. New construction is crap. Most of them aren’t built to last the length of a mortgage.

When you buy an older home you know there are things that will need expensive repairs. I bought my house knowing that 40 amps would get us by but it was going to cost $20k to get us current. The HVAC was on its last scheduled year of life. The roof was on its last scheduled year of life. Same for the water heater. The septic passed an inspection when it shouldn’t have and I dropped $7k four months later to replace it because it collapsed. The AC hasn’t worked in 3 years. I need to patch parts of the roof. The water heater died but I was able to replace it myself for a quarter the price of someone else doing it. But this house was 90k in 2017. I knew what I was buying. With new houses you expect things to last. But they don’t. They are built to sell, not to last. And the more expensive the new house the worse the failures get. Don’t even get me started on modern McMansion roof design.

Does this have anything to do with new homes being built way out in the middle of nowhere while everybody wants to live close to things?

So… older homes are… cheaper?

Huh. Looks like this also happened around 2007. The housing market crashed in 2008. I wonder if these are correlated