Buying a House?
 

So my players want to rent/buy a house in a large walled city.

How much would you charge? I said they could rent one for maybe $50-$100 a week, so for now they are paying $320 a month (which also takes into account, I suppose, their living expenses from their jobs). But what if they want to buy it flat out?

Re: Buying a House?
 

Then you need to decide what housing costs are like in that part of your campaign world. There are no fixed rules for that, and as you can see from the real-world housing market, even in modern times, real estate can vary crazily from place to place and time to time.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Adventurers. In our town. I think we all know what this means.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Sooo….nobody has had to deal with this an has any reasonable ideas?

Re: Buying a House?
 

For simplicity's sake I just convert £sterling to Silver so I don't need separate price lists, I can just work from real world prices instead. So a monthly rental of basic accommodation is about £400-500. Buying a house will vary a lot with size and location but will probably be around £100-150k for something at the lower end (not a slum, but nothing fancy).

If they're buying in the capital city or in the rich quarter that could easily scale up by several magnitudes.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Looking into it a bit more, if we assume that purchase price should have some relationship to rental value then we can use tools like price to rent ratio to help.

Price to Rent ratio is calculated by Purchase Price divided by Annual Rental cost.

A price-to-rent ratio of 1 to 15 indicates it is much better to buy than rent; a price-to-rent ratio of 16 to 20 indicates it is typically better to rent than buy, and a price-to-rent ratio of 21 or more indicates it is much better to rent than buy.

If your guys are renting at £320 per month, you could set the ratio at 15 (the top end of the "better to buy" scale). That's £3,840 annual rental cost. Multiplied by 15 gives you a purchase price of £57,600.

It's a starting point anyway.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Taking todays world as a guide to order of magnitude...

Lets say a small house in the UK (where I live) is anywhere from (modern day) £20,000 to £400,000 depending on:- geographical location, weather, proximity to ports and main trade routes, the perceived value of the quarter (inside or outside the city walls, surrounded by orc beggars or royal scions) its construction of mud, wattle and daub or stone, any special features or history - gardens, cellars, stables etc.

And lets say the wages of people in the UK vary from something like £15,000 to £80,000 commonly.

So a house might cost you anything from a quarter of a years wages, to 20ish years of earnings, depending. Or, assuming poorer people live in the poorer houses, you would need to spend a year of wages if poor, or 4-5 years of wages if rich, to get a house that 'suits you'.

Jobs.

Low paid workers in Cidri seem to earn about $30 a week after expenses. So that would make the cheapest houses something like $1500. Top earners like healers and sages are around $100 a week, so that would make a nice place somewhere around $20,000.

OR

Another way to look at it is rents. Subsistence costs are $20 a week, $50 if you have 'pretension to social standing' which arguably half goes on rent - lets assume so. Lets also assume that a landowner who decides to buy a house and then rent it out would like to break even after, say, 10 years, and then be into profit. That would give us a property rental income (and house purchase value) of $5,000 over ten years at the low end and a higher end around $12,500.

OR

You could consider how much it would cost to build a house. A builder will cost you $70 a week, maybe with 4 labourers for $25 each a week. If a mid-range wood/wattle+daub house takes 12 weeks to build, and half the cost is labour, the house will cost you $4,000 and I guess you could sell it for at least $8,000, but then I haven't included the land cost, or probably the fittings like windows and ironwork.

OR

We could look up the cost of Medieval houses and convert to Cidri currency:

http://web.archive.org/web/201106282...html#BUILDINGS

Using Army wages of around 6d a day for armoured infantry compared to $75 a week for a Cidri recruit - we get a conversion of roughly 1d = $2

That puts a cottage at $960; a craftsmans house at $4,800-7,200 and a merchants house at $16,000 to $32,000

Double checking this, we can see that this information puts the rent of a cottage at 1/8 of its cost, rent for a craftsmans house at 1/10 to 1/15 of its value and rent of a merchants house at 1/16 to 1/20th its value. That would be $10 a month for a cottage, $40 a month for a craftsmans house, and about $80 a month for a merchants house. Not too far off but maybe a little low.

---------------

Given all that, you need to take into account Location, Location, Location, but it looks like a good sized house suitable for around 4 adventurers, in a quiet part of a major city, might cost $6,000 to $10,000?

Re: Buying a House?
 

The prices of today's housing is massively propped up by the normalisation of usury. When banking cartels have less power, cash prices are lower. So take ratios like 15-20 years rent being the asking price with a grain of salt.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Now that's just silly. Home mortgage rates in the US are currently under 4% annually. (And they're tax-deductible, which means you can really subtract your marginal tax rate for a proper comparison -- it's really more like 3% minus.)

Interest rates in medieval economies are harder to pin down, but taking the loans we have in evidence -- often enough to national governments -- the effective rates often worked out to be in the 30% or 40% range, annually. The surviving text of some anti-usury laws keeping those wicked Jewish moneylenders in check were often a penny per pound, up to 4d -- per week, which annualized is over 20% up to over 80%. It was a much riskier time to lend money, and so rates were higher.

Housing prices aren't propped by greedy banks. They're propped up by wealthy people willing to pay a lot for their own private home, along with "location, location, location". Compare Manhattan or the SF Bay Area with, say, rural Kansas. Interest rates are about the same. Housing prices are not.

Re: Buying a House?
 

^suggest you research the concept of usury. When lending at interest is not readily available, the cash prices are much lower. It's not do much whether interest rates are are 4% or higher, it's the normalisation of huge amounts of credit.
Also suggest you lay off talk of evil Jews; probably the mods won't take to that.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Thanks! That's great stuff, I appreciate it!

One question I am left with though is what are someone's cost of living at different salary levels? The rules say that subsistence is $20 and it included in those that live at subsistence level. I doubt that is supposed to mean that a Healer lives at subsistence levels. So some of their money is going to 'rent' or whatever, that just leaves them with their play money at the end.

Which on the one hand makes it easy...you guys all have jobs so you don't need to worry about rent. But on the other hand, clearly someone who makes $30 a week and someone who makes $150 can't reasonably be living in the same house (their cost of living must be different).

Ugh...I like the job system, I just wish it didn't hand wave this stuff or took more details (like purchasing property) into account!

Re: Buying a House?
 

I get your desire, and more guidelines would be good to have or develop, though I think they should also include the concept of different locations having different economies.

ITL does say a bit more than that. Pretensions to any sort of social status cost at least $50/week. And it's not just about lodging costs.

Any answer to what housing prices "should" be is going to get over-applied unless it mentions how much prices can vary.

Really I think it calls for the GM to come up with figures for the current time and place, and to vary those numbers. It can make the game feel more real, interesting, and sometimes quite entertaining, to deal with varying mundane costs and the people who offer them.

As the people who started in with economics observed, housing prices vary massively due to artificial causes, and would in Cidri too, which is why I think the GM ought to choose what housing markets are like for each place in their own worlds, and not just have one "standard" set of prices.

I know of one house that sold for $30,000 in 1970, which some years ago sold for well over $1,000,000. That's not inflation, and even the $30,000 price was generally unaffordable except by the very wealthy and/or those who could get a mortgage.

In Cidri, probably most places don't have real estate loans, or if they do, the "credit" for a band of adventurer types would not I think be very high...

But there probably are houses build by and/or for lower-class folks, which might be quite affordable for middle-class folks and/or adventurers to buy outright.

And someplace like a well-off capital city with more demand for housing than supply would probably be much more expensive than someplace like Winterhome in Dran, which supposedly used to have ten times its current population.

Re: Buying a House?
 

No worries, it was an interesting exercise! :)

ITL says $20 a week subsistence and $50 if you have social pretensions.

I interpret that as $20 gets you the bare minimum - some (occasionally dubious) food in your belly and a dry bed (probably with uninvited guests). $50 gets you respectable living - a room in a reasonable inn, stabling for your horse, food, some new clothes now and then, a few beers in the evening.

If you want servants, fine clothes and your own swanky town house it's going to be a LOT more. I don't read any of the jobs as going much beyond the $50 a week on living.

Re: Buying a House?
 

So that leaves the question, does that $50 come out of your salary or do some jobs come with it included (like the invisible subsistence)? I could see a Healer getting it by default, for example, but a merc recruit probably not so much.

Re: Buying a House?
 

Honestly I'm okay with that. I know that real estate varies from X to Y, and I can happily change it as suited. Weapons and armor get a default cost and that's sufficient, GMs can always change that according to their needs. Just a base cost either for a village or a city (or preferably both) would be good.

I know I'm spoiled, the last OSR clone I was playing a lot of did a lot with real-estate and my players got into owning a house and all that.

Re: Buying a House?
 

The earnings per week is after expenses. So if you want raw pay for a healer, probably add on $40 or so? A mercenary will be provided with a tent and a bedroll and some 'stew' I should think, so the army has taken care of their expenses? :)

Re: Buying a House?
 

Yeah, its just figuring out who gets what invisible bonus?