Why buy an asset when you can rent it?

An interesting article in Reuters, about an asset(house)

Robert Shiller, a Yale economist and author of "Irrational Exuberance," which predicted the stock price collapse in 2000, has recently turned his eye to house prices.

Between 1890 and 2004 he finds that real house returns would have been zero if not for two brief periods: one immediately following World War II and another since about 2000.

Even if we include these periods houses returned just 0.4% a year, he says.

A house, after all, is an ordinary good. It can't think up ways to drive profits like a company's managers can. If land, cement, steel and money are all commodities, how can a combination of all these not be a commodity?

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