Is Home Ownership Outdated?

As a record number of banks carpe domus ("seize the home"), and as jobs keep shuffling around in a more mobile, fluid society, one has to ask: is home ownership outdated?

And I don't mean in terms of fads, as if owning a home were akin to owning a bean bag chair or a lava lamp. Fads come and go, but the underlying structure stays the same.

What I'm asking is whether the underlying structure is changing. After all, it used to be that you could graduate high school, get a good manufacturing job with enough pay and benefits to provide for your family, and retire with a healthy pension. One job in one town for one life.

Owning a home made sense. You stayed put and your grandchildren were raised in the same hometown as you. You paid off your mortgage and maybe fueled your retirement off of its sale, leveraging its increased value.

But in today's world, that kind of life is as anachronistic as the milkmen and paper boys that went along with it. By 2006, workers between the ages of 18 and 38 changed jobs an average of 10 times; many times, switching cities to do so. And, with housing prices falling, a home is no longer a retirement tool.

This new way of living will end up drastically changing the way we work and live. As Richard Florida's new book The Great Reset points out, American society most likely (and in some cases already is) going to become a 'rentership society', rather than an 'ownership society'.

That's not to say ownership will disappear altogether. Indeed, it will end up making good real estate agents that much more in demand, and it will mean those out to own a home will be doing so for the right reasons, not just because they heard it was a good investment.

LOLs & Triple Word Scores

I want to get one thing clear here: I hate text messaging. Absolutely loathe it.

So, when I wrote yesterday's blog post about texting, I had to ask myself: do I really believe this?

The answer, of course, is yes, even if I don't like it myself.

Why? The numbers speak for themselves. Eighty-eight percent of Gen Y cell phone users use their phones to text. A quarter of them send over 50 text messages a day. Forty-one percent of Gen Y users do not own a land line.

I don't like texting mostly because I have an old candy bar phone that is not very conducive to text messaging, but I'd be a fool to dismiss it as a fad. I believe text messaging is here to stay and is a very effective way to communicate, even if I don't do it as much myself.

Changes are inevitable, but many people are still stagnant and staunch in their views of the past. This week, for example, it was announced that Scrabble was changing their rules for the first time in its 60-odd year history to include proper nouns (a Bjork Triple Word Score, anyone?). Waves of fans cried foul, only to discover that it was a special edition that was getting the change, not the game as a whole.

Of course, the real estate industry has been no different. Many agents were staunch in their old ways of doing things - fax machines, driving around town, dialing with rotary phones. A sea-change is happening now, of course, and most agents realize the benefits of going online, signing up with a social media site, and even embracing text messaging.

The question is, are you one of them?