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Increasing supply lowers the mean price for the market as a whole. The laws of supply and demand do not rule out local changes that run contrary to the overall market depending on the nature of the new supply.

To pick one particular example, Facebook's construction of 394 apartments next to its campus is actually driving up home prices in that part of Menlo Park because the apartments are nowhere near sufficient to meet the demands of Facebook employees but are accompanied by new commercial developments that make the surrounding property more attractive to other Facebook employees.



Thanks for providing a real world example!

But I think the data can be interpreted in several ways.

If home prices are rising while apartments are being constructed, that doesn't have mean the price increase is caused by the construction.

For one thing, these units won't exist until 2016¹, so supply hasn't actually increased. It could also be that the area needs 1000 units to offset the increased demand. Or, as you imply, that the higher level of services make the area more attractive, rather than the added units themselves.

I would like to see actual studies by real economists to change my thoughts on this.

¹ http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27717752/facebook-flo...


because the apartments are nowhere near sufficient to meet the demands of Facebook employees

That's all you needed to say. Supply and demand works.




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