Your house is two things: land that gains value, and a building that wears out.
People argue endlessly about whether a house is a good investment. The argument is stuck because it treats the house as one number on a balance sheet. It is not one thing. It is a plot of land, which tends to gain value, and a building, which is 22 systems steadily wearing out on their own clocks. Once you separate the two, the question stops being whether the house is an asset and starts being a better one: which parts are gaining, which are wearing, and which of them will ever be yours to see through.
The argument about your house is about the wrong number.
On one side, the sceptics: Robert Kiyosaki calls a home a liability, because it takes money out of your pocket rather than putting it in. Ramit Sethi calls homeownership a religion and points to the phantom costs, the 30% to 50% on top of the mortgage in tax, insurance, maintenance and interest. Morgan Housel bought his own house without a mortgage and still calls it something to live in, not an investment. Robert Shiller, who built the house-price index everyone quotes, found that real US house prices barely moved for the century to the 1990s, and noted the reason in passing: housing takes maintenance, it depreciates, and it goes out of style.
On the other side, the believers, led by Dave Ramsey: a house is the biggest wealth-builder most people ever own, a forced savings account you happen to live in. In the United States the median homeowner has a net worth near $400,000 while the median renter has about $10,000 (Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances). That gap is true, and we are not going to argue with it.
Both sides are doing the same thing: arguing about the price of the house, the single number on the balance sheet. Neither is looking at the thing you live in and pay to keep standing. The net-worth gap is a story about forced saving, borrowed money and land. It says nothing about the condition of the building, which is where the money goes.
The gain is in the land, not the building.
When a house goes up in value, most of what moved is the ground under it. Across advanced economies, rising land prices explain roughly 80% of the growth in house prices since the Second World War (Knoll, Schularick and Steger, American Economic Review), and real house prices were close to flat for the century before that (Robert Shiller). The land share of a home's value has roughly doubled over the past century, and the effect is at least as strong in Europe as in the United States. The building sitting on that land does the opposite of appreciate.
Carries roughly 80% of the long-run gain in house prices, and its share of a home's value has doubled in a century. This is the part people mean when they say their house went up.
Depreciates: about 1.5% a year measured from sale prices, and up to roughly 7% a year in economic terms once outdated systems and layouts are counted.
Is mostly the maintenance you pour in, plus the value lost as systems go out of style. Owners keep spending to hold the line, so the price falls slower than the building wears. That spend never shows up as "depreciation," only as invoices.
The tax code already agrees with you.
If the split between gaining land and wearing building sounds like an opinion, it is written into tax law. In Germany, a landlord may write the building down for tax at 2% a year over 50 years, or 3% for a new build, but may never depreciate the land, because the land is not considered to wear out. The building wears; the land does not. That is the same claim this study is making, in the statute book.
Here is the twist. That write-down is only for landlords. The identical building, owner-occupied, gets no depreciation at all: across most of Europe the value of living in your own home is left untaxed and unmeasured. Same bricks, opposite accounting.
You are one owner in a line of them.
A typical ownership lasts about a decade. Set that against the clocks of the building: for almost everything the house is made of, you are one owner among many. Only the fastest-wearing parts are ever yours to see through.
each dot ≈ one ownership (a typical ~12 years) · is you · one representative part per system
A typical ownership runs about a decade: roughly 10 years in the UK, 12 in the US. It varies widely across Europe and there is no single figure, so the dots are a reference, not a measurement. The point holds across the whole range: even a 20-year hold never sees the roof, the structure, the pipes or the wiring through a single life. Lifespans come from the companion study of how long a house lasts.
See the systems as a table
| System | Lifespan (yr) | ≈ owners over its life |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | 100–200 | 13 |
| Foundation | 100–150 | 10 |
| Roof | 60–100 | 7 |
| Walls | 60–100 | 7 |
| Chimney | 50–100 | 6 |
| Waste pipes | 50–100 | 6 |
| Wiring | 50–80 | 5 |
| Stairs | 40–80 | 5 |
| Water pipes | 40–70 | 5 |
| Gas pipes | 40–60 | 4 |
| Locks | 25–40 | 3 |
| Solar panels | 25–35 | 3 |
| Windows and doors | 25–35 | 3 |
| Lightning | 20–30 | 2 |
| Lift | 20–30 | 2 |
| Wet room | 20–30 | 2 |
| Data cabling | 15–25 | 2 |
| Gutters | 15–25 | 2 |
| Heating | 15–20 | 1 |
| Interior finish | 12–16 | 1 |
| Ventilation | 10–15 | 1 |
| Fire safety | 10–10 | 1 |
What the price hides is a maintenance ledger.
Put the pieces together and the ordinary story of homeownership changes shape. You buy at a price that reflects the land and a building assumed to be sound. You hold for about a decade, during which a few of the fast clocks come due on your watch and the slow ones quietly age underneath you. You sell at a price that reflects the land again, plus a building the next owner also assumes is sound. The deferred maintenance rarely shows up in the price: homes with visible neglect sell for only a few percent less, nowhere near the cost of the work waiting inside them. The bill does not disappear. It moves to the next owner, and to the one after that.
This is the ledger the price never shows you, and it is the one appkeep keeps. Not whether to buy, and not whether the house is a good investment: those are your call, and they turn on the land and the market. What the tools track is the building, component by component, so the clocks stop being invisible. The lifespan study maps how long each part lasts, and with the repair-or-replace calculator you see whether one ageing part is in a repair year or a replacement year. The demo plan projects every clock in a house forward. All of it is free to open.
Common questions
Is a house an asset?
It depends what you mean by the house. A house is two things: the land it stands on, and the building on top. The land is where the gain lives. Rising land prices explain roughly 80% of the growth in house prices across advanced economies since the Second World War (Knoll, Schularick and Steger, American Economic Review), and real house prices were close to flat for the century before that (Robert Shiller). The building itself depreciates, at roughly 1.5% a year measured from sale prices and up to about 7% a year in economic terms once obsolescence is counted. So a house can hold or gain value while the building inside it steadily wears out. The financial argument about houses is an argument about land and leverage, not about the building.
Does a house appreciate or depreciate?
Both, in different parts. The land tends to appreciate and carries most of the headline gain. The building depreciates as its components age: a heating system runs about 15 to 20 years, a wet-room membrane 20 to 30, windows 25 to 35, a roof 60 to 100, load-bearing structure 100 to 200. Owners spend on maintenance to slow that decline, which is why sale prices fall more slowly than the building physically wears. The tax treatment makes the split explicit: a landlord may depreciate the building for tax but never the land, because the land is not considered to wear out.
How long does the average person own a house?
About a decade in the markets where people move most: the average UK homeowner stays around 10 years, the median US homeowner about 12. It varies widely across Europe, with much longer holds in Southern and Eastern Europe, and there is no single harmonised European figure. Either way, one ownership is short against the lifespans of the building. Most components outlast several owners, so a typical owner inherits parts that are already part-worn and hands them to the next owner rather than ever replacing them.