Source: Numbeo

Tools: R/ggplot2

Why is Puerto Rico called out separately from the US?

Why are Syria and Ghana so high? What's going on exactly to cause this specifically in these two countries?

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I suppose never ending war and poverty would be the big cause.

In general what we see here is even with all the exorbitant housing prices in most of developed countries, the situation is much worse in poorer part of the world. Iraq and Palestine seem to be the only odd country in bottom 20.

Not sure where they pulled these numbers from for NL; but looking at the median income (around 38k gross) and the average price for an appartment (multiplier 9.8) or a single family home (multiplier 11.8) I don't see how one could reasonably come to a factor of 7.19 in the graph.

Yes but it would suggest that house prices remain high and buying remains desirable?

You can check here but their median house price calculation is something like this

  public double calculateMedianHousePrice() {
    return (calculateMedianHousePriceCityCentre() + calculateMedianHousePriceOutsideOfCentre()) / 2;
  }

Also

> Price to Income Ratio is the basic measure for apartment purchase affordability (lower is better). It is generally calculated as the ratio of median apartment prices to median familial disposable income, expressed as years of income (although variations are used also elsewhere). Our formula assumes and uses: > * net disposable family income, as defined as 1.5 * the average net salary (50% is assumed percentage of women in the workforce) > * median apartment size is 90 square meters > * price per square meter (the formula uses) is the average price of square meter in the city center and outside of the city center

It’s not uncommon to see US territories listed separately (most lists have the Virgin Islands and Guam separate as well)

If I had to guess the problems are 1] lower wages makes the ratio higher, 2] in Syria’s case, war destroys existing buildings and takes resources away from building more, and 3] people aren’t living in “houses” so only the wealthy would have them, while most people live in apartments or more traditional buildings that don’t count

pretty much all of numbeo's numbers are always pulled out of their ass, which is why it should be avoided by anyone looking for valid data

I always find it funny when Redditors say the US is in a real estate bubble and prices will crash like they did in 2009. Reddit is on grade A copium.

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It's kinda weird that they're calculating the mean and calling it a median.

Plus the ratio doesn’t matter that much if the bank won’t give you the loan anyway. Which in case of the Netherlands you’re pretty much not getting if you’re buying alone in or around the big cities. Even people who are higher educated with good jobs can’t buy alone in NL. You either need a partner, rich parents or be getting that doctor/lawyer type money.

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They are doing the average of two medians.. one in the center and one not seems like

Yeah, totally broken. You can't buy a house in NL with just over 3 years of "disposable income". I can't fathom where that would be possible in the US either. Sounds like the top salaries and the cheapest houses skew the distribytions enough, to result in a useless ratio.

Could be using average household income. That’s $70k which works out to $311k house price which doesn’t feel crazy.

Localizing by city can lead to insanely high ratios. This data could be skewed by how rural a country is as well. My local city as average salary 37k with average home price at 1.1 M, putting it high on this list

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You can’t average two medians. If there are 5 times more houses in the city center than there are out of it, this will completely skew it in favor of the out of city center median

People complaining arent realizing that the median house price only includes houses that people would even be put on the formal market

It's early here so I read this at first as Median Horse Price and I was very impressed that someone had gone through the trouble to figure this out

For 99.9% of human history, that graph would have been more important.

I can speak about the argentina case (i would assume is the same in other countries) there are a few reason:

1. no credit even a couple with an above average or average income is not able to get a mortage.

2. salaries are ultra low but houses are valued in usd.

3. traditionally real estate was seen as the safest way to store wealth. If you put the money in the bank there might be a confiscatory measure (see Argentina’s crisis of 2001, particularly “corralito”) or a goverment pushed devaluation. As properties are valued in USD here, the government would be una le to take your house and you would have those savings protected, eventually you could sell the property.