My guess for why I was wrong about US housing

From Colby who wrote a post also examining such considerations several years ago comments:

"I'm not familiar with this dataset but eyeballing the data and others I've seen of international comparisons it seems there's a pretty tight correlation between price/income and population density, which seems intuitive, and America remains a rather sparsely populated country. The more relevant metric for investment purposes would probably be rental yield, and the figure I see here for US city centers of 10.5% as of 2019 seems totally out of whack with other data I've seen. Alex and I recently did a detailed analysis for a client who was considering buying a rental property in the Bay Area and after accounting for all relevant costs the net rental yield he was looking at was well below that on T-bills. SF is more overvalued than most cities and things have changed since 2019, but still. Now, you can find plenty of properties in the US outside the major cities where rental yields are quite attractive, but that's a point I've been careful to make all along, my long held somewhat-anti-homeownership position has always been focused on the major US cities where housing prices are high (and most of our clients/prospects live). Alex has actually bought a few investment properties in middle-of-nowhere parts of the US and he has written/will be writing more about this on our blog."

Please provide a link to the data. I'd like to find out where specific other countries are on the list, e.g., Germany.

Great job writing an oops post, with a short and effective explanation. Strong upvote for you!

It's weird that the US has such a low price to income ratio and thus such a high rental yield. In an efficient market, real estate investors should flock to countries with high rental yields, buying up housing until rental yields equalize. Why hasn't this happened yet?

I had similar hpusing related "i'm the smartest guy in the room" belief some years back.

I was looking at broad amounts people were retiring on (not enough) in the US and then extrapolated that these older folks would have to sell or get second mortgages just to live.

And since the baby boomers are retiring , I thought (with no more data or numbers to back me) that we would see signifigant downward pressure on housing prices.

But of course as long as this doesn't happen in large piles , in large numbers of zipcodes and sort of in a short amount of time , then its not an issue.

Over decades in large parts of the world facing demographic challenges yeh. Not here.

Anecdotal, but in the UK, in 1986, as a just graduated PhD I bought a 3 bedroom house for less than 4 times my salary. At present a similar house in a similar location, will cost  roughly 10 times a starting PhD salary. House ownership for most young people in the UK is becoming a distant and ever delayed dream.

I was going to write, "surely the relevant figure is how much you pay per month, as a percentage of your income", but then I looked at the actual image and it seems like that's what you meant by house price.