Owning a house is one of the few ways to try to get ahead. From the Atlantic:
Today, the top 0.1 percent of Americans—about 160,000 families, with net assets greater than $20 million—own 22 percent of household wealth, while the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent of Americans is no different than during their grandparents’ time.
What does this look like at the household level? Perhaps the most striking chart produced by the economists’ efforts to measure U.S. wealth is the one below, which shows that after a long march upward, and then a steep decline, the “average real wealth of bottom 90 percent families is no higher in 2012 than in 1986.” Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of wealthy families has almost completely recovered from the ill effects of the financial crisis.
Read the full article here:
To be truly horrified you would find only 63 000 people with assets over $1 000 000 according to the same survey in South Africa. With the number of sales you make it would probably place you in the top 100 estate agents in the country by turnover! The people complaining about the difficulty they have in affording $ 400 000 residences in S.D. should count their blessings ;D
500K gets you a 1000sqf condo in a so-so part of town in Shanghai
I am not sure you could call SD a world class city, but it is cheap if you compare it to a lot of the major cities around the world.