A house is a building; housing is a market
Almost everything written about housing is written about prices, and almost everything written about prices is written at national scale. That is the wrong scale for nearly every question an ordinary reader has. A national index is an average of thousands of local markets that are not competing with one another. Nobody buys the average. People buy one house, on one street, in one town, from one seller, using one lender, in one month.
A local housing market is small, slow and lumpy. In a town of any size only a few dozen houses may change hands in a month, and each of them is different in ways that matter: the lot, the roof, the aspect, the school catchment, the noise, the year it was framed. Because the goods are not interchangeable and the transactions are rare, the price of a house is not read off a screen. It is discovered, slowly, by two parties who each know something the other does not.
This site sets out the mechanisms. How stock and flow determine what a market can do; what actually moves prices as opposed to what is said to move them; the sequence of a purchase and of a sale; what a survey or an inspection can establish and what it cannot; what a mortgage is when the language is stripped out of it; and why renting and owning cannot be compared with a single number.
The place writing sits alongside the mechanics for a reason. Housing stock is the physical residue of old economic decisions — where a river could turn a wheel, where a railway put a siding, where a mill built its village, where a ridge made a road expensive. Understanding why a street looks the way it does explains a good deal about what stands on it now.
Nothing here is advice about any particular property, loan or decision. Figures, rules and terminology vary between jurisdictions and between lenders, and the arithmetic on these pages is illustrative, worked from stated assumptions rather than from any real offer.
Current reading
Subjects, A to Z
- Buying a homeThe sequence from offer to keys, and what can go wrong at each joint.
- GlossaryPlain definitions of the terms used across the rest of the site.
- Market mechanicsStock, flow, turnover and time on market: how a local market clears.
- Mortgages explainedPrincipal, interest, amortisation and the parts of a monthly payment.
- Rates and repaymentHow the shape of a loan, not only its rate, decides what it costs.
- Renting or owningThe costs on each side, and why the comparison resists one number.
- Selling a homePreparation, pricing logic, negotiation and the closing sequence.
- Streets and subdivisionsHow block geometry and lot depth set the character of a neighbourhood.
- Surveys and searchesWhat an inspection covers, what a title search covers, and their limits.
- What moves pricesBorrowing costs, incomes, supply and the slower structural forces.
Explainers in depth
How a local housing market actually works
MechanicsWhy a market with a few dozen monthly sales behaves nothing like a market with a live order book, and what “balanced” really means.
Buying a home, step by step
SequenceEach stage of a purchase in order, with the conditions that make an agreement provisional until it is not.
Mortgages in plain terms
MoneyWhat is actually being bought and sold when a loan is secured on a house, and where every dollar of a payment goes.
Rates, terms and repayment
MoneyWorked arithmetic on term length, rate differences and overpayment, from assumptions stated on the page.
The Blue Ridge foothills
PlaceTerrain, water, roads and the way upland land was divided — and what that left behind as housing.