What if you bought Average US house in 1990?
Real estate · House. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play4.3× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Average US house at the start of 1990 would be worth about $4,342 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
The average American house is the largest asset most US households will ever own, and its price history over this period is a story in three acts. Through the 1990s prices rose roughly with incomes. Then, from around 2000, cheap credit, subprime lending, securitisation and a belief that national house prices never fall produced the biggest housing bubble in US history, peaking around 2006-2007.
The bust that followed triggered the 2008 financial crisis. National prices fell roughly a quarter from peak to trough, millions of homes went into foreclosure, and prices did not bottom until about 2012. Recovery was steady through the 2010s as construction stayed low after the crash. The pandemic then produced another surge, as low mortgage rates and the scramble for space pushed prices up sharply in 2020-2022. When rates jumped above 7 percent in 2023, sales volumes plunged but prices held, because owners with cheap fixed mortgages refused to sell. Over the full period the average price roughly quadrupled, though this chart excludes maintenance, taxes and the rent an owner avoids paying.
The lesson: A house's price chart ignores maintenance, taxes and avoided rent; comparing it with a stock index requires counting both sides of the ledger.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $76.00 | $4,342 | $19,429 | 4.3× |
| 1995 | $78.00 | $4,231 | $14,783 | 4.2× |
| 2000 | $100 | $3,300 | $4,626 | 3.3× |
| 2003 | $128 | $2,578 | $7,727 | 2.6× |
| 2005 | $170 | $1,941 | $5,763 | 1.9× |
| 2007 | $185 | $1,784 | $4,789 | 1.8× |
| 2008 | $172 | $1,919 | $4,626 | 1.9× |
| 2010 | $145 | $2,276 | $6,071 | 2.3× |
| 2012 | $135 | $2,444 | $5,312 | 2.4× |
| 2015 | $172 | $1,919 | $3,301 | 1.9× |
| 2018 | $200 | $1,650 | $2,519 | 1.6× |
| 2020 | $215 | $1,535 | $2,092 | 1.5× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $4,342. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Average US house is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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