> These houses are very old, and must be worn out. Therefor they would have depreciated to zero...
That is quite obtuse.
Depreciation can be countered with maintenance. It is literally a physics concept: Entropy. It is a natural process but not unavoidable.
A house that is thirty years old that has not been maintained can be a complete wreck. The roof has leaked all over the interior finish, the windows have broken and let in local animals to make their nests. Etcetera.
The house next door that is thirty years old and had the roof maintained and windows fixed etcetera might be pristine.
I think it is fun to see people on Hacker News forgetting about, even denying, entropy!
When house values "fall" this is NOT depreciation, but market forces (supply/demand, interest rates, mortgage rates, government policy...).
The point of "depreciation" is normally to allow things to be written off at a reduced value over the assets lifetime.
Cars do "depreciate" because over time, they face wear and tear and at the end of their lifespan they are traded in for "scrap value".
Homes do not depreciate because there is no logical reason why this asset's value would reduce over time/wear/tear when it can be properly maintained, as is the case of the houses from the 1700's i sent you.
If your not being purposefully obtuse, do you understand the concept of differing timespans?
Given enough, time, such as millions of years, yes any human made structure will likely depreciate to zero value. Because even solid granite can be eroded down into dust from simple weathering, let alone normal building materials.
That doesn't guarantee any specific structure, such as the one you linked, will depreciate to zero within human timescales.
And obviously if structures are maintained they will probably not.
That doesn't invalidate the concept of wear and tear or depreciation.
If you maintain a structure you are by definition putting resources such as energy, materials, labor, etc., into it, so maintenance isn't free.
Those resources represent a real cost that someone has to pay for.
So, moving the goalposts your new position is that houses depreciate over geological timescales?
Got it.
Instead of posting here, why not take your fantastic housing model (they depereciate) and go buy homes.
you can show up at their house with your spreadsheeet and show them how you applied an appropriate depreciation factor and now they should sell the house because this is the fair market value.
You can also explain to everyone how over longer times scales houses almost always appreciate. If you look at the SP500 for a week it may go down, but over a decade it is almost always positive.
Houses are the same, so where exactly is the depreciation you speak of?
Again, using your theory of depreciation and long time scales.
From the linnk i sent you: "W. B. Yeats so much that he purchased it for £35 around 1917. From then on it became known as the Yeats’ Tower."
What is the current value of this house, after factoring in your depreciation factors?
> Instead of posting here, why not take your fantastic housing model (they depereciate) and go buy homes.
It is often true that the old house on a piece of valuable land would cost more to repair than it would cost to build a new house on that land.
Often enough the added cost of removing the old house (the use of asbestos in the past often vastly increases that cost) added on top of everything means that the land itself can loose its value.
We see this a lot with old industrial sites, but it happens to residential buildings too.
As for "timescales", do not be mean. The time-scale for depreciation of a car that is in use is measured in seconds New cars loose a third (? I know more about property than cars?) of their value when driven off the lot. Houses take a bit longer, but not "geological time-scales"
This is starting to sound like a lame attempt at trolling, or an auto-generated text.
If you genuinely cannot understand that the concepts of depreciation, wear and tear, etc., can exist side by side with the concept of appreciation of the underlying land value, then I recommend you do some reading before engaging in conversations on HN that simply discredit yourself.
In any case, since the last reply seems to not make any coherent points at all, I won't try to deduce if there's any further meaning.
