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by vintermann 7 days ago
If you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.

Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.
3 comments
taeric 7 days ago
This depends heavily on the industry of the area. Go to a college town and you will find owner occupancy is not that big of a deal. Go to a luxury resort town and they literally make their money from non-residents transiently moving through.

I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.

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zdragnar 7 days ago
So long as the percentage of people who live in a home they own is high, there's not a great reason to care about owner occupancy.

You're just using it as a proxy for people owning homes. It's not a given that the two numbers are always opposed.

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thaumasiotes 7 days ago
It's very easy to see that owner-occupancy is an incoherent metric.

Stipulate that owning a home is good.

As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.

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bluefirebrand 7 days ago
> As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down

Not necessarily at all. Plenty of people rent who would like to own homes too

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thaumasiotes 7 days ago
All you have to do is let the number keep going up. Yes, it's a necessary outcome.
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bluefirebrand 7 days ago
Here's a hypothetical: if everyone owns a home, no one rents homes anymore, right? I mean why would you?

So why would anyone buy a second home in that scenario? Maybe as a studio or whatever, perhaps. But as homes become less useful as a rental investment, the number of non owner-occupied homes seems like it will decrease too?

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