While looking through some articles on the web, I came across this little paper; a conference submission from 2007 on: "HOUSING CONSUMPTION AND RISK SOCIETIES: HOMEOWNERSHIP AS A MEDIATOR OF RISK IN BRITAIN, JAPAN AND THE NETHERLANDS".
Not really that juicy, but the extract of some of the responses from the different countries speaks for itself:
6.2 GOOD INVESTMENT OR SECURE ASSET
I: Do you think this house has been a good investment?
M: I don’t think so at all. We knew at the time we bought
this place that the prices were going down.
I don’t really expect them to recover too much either,
but it is quite important to maximize the performance
of this house. You might feel that it is better to
own a house than renting even though the value has
gone down
(Japan, home-owner, male, 37).
It all happened by chance, not that we thought
beforehand that we could make a killing
by selling. In fact, you weren’t at all sure
whether buying the house on Parklaan was a
good idea, or if the price we paid wasn’t too
high. Looking back, it turned out to be a
good decision, but that...Not speculating at all.
No, it all happened to pass off very well,
not as we expected. We couldn’t have anticipated it.
I didn’t realize that the market would...
Well, it just exploded. We sold at the right time.
(The Netherlands, home-owner, male, 59)
I think it is the only possible way of making
decent money in the long-term, there are no
get-rich schemes, you can’t do that, the stock
market is not worth investing in, pension
schemes aren’t worth you putting your money...
And also you can buy properties with
other people’s money, whereas
if you invest in stocks or shares or in a pension scheme
every single penny has to be
your own money, but if you are buying an asset like
property you can borrow up to 85% of the
cost and in ten years time when it has
doubled in value, that’s all yours, so your
money is worth 11 times what it was worth 10
years ago...And in the meantime someone else
services the debt.
(UK, home-owner, male, 33)
