Otdfbt

I read Investopia's definition and my take away is that compound interest applies to an investment that yields some return on a regular basis and that yield is reinvested in that instrument. If I have a property as an investment property, then yield of the investment is the rent I could extract. I could consider this compounding if I use that yield to finance another rental property.

For the scenario of a property I live in, it's less of an investment and more of a savings instrument.

I believe that the answer to my question is no but I'm not very sure.

It's not an investment that can grow at the same rate year-on-year because higher prices put pressure on the ability to grow higher. There is a limit to how high a property can be valued at... whereas a compound interest model, there's no limit as you are accumulating more of that yield generating asset.

Edit This answer may also apply to this question.

Compound interest is only relevant when you get paid interest and you reinvest it.

In cases where you buy, hold and sell, with no income generated during the holding period, there isn’t any income from the investment to reinvest. There’s no interest, and hence no compound interest.

The ‘growth’ of home values is just a ‘paper’ (re)valuation. If you paid $100,000 for some property and the price went up to $120,000 but you don’t sell, you don’t get paid $20,000. You don’t get paid anything at all until you sell. In this sense, there’s no compound interest.

On the other hand, if your property is maintained in line with other properties in your area, and prices generally rise 10% one year and 5% the next, you can crunch the numbers as (1) * (1 + 10%) * (1 + 5%). In this sense, you do have compounding - but only of the notional values, and assuming the changes are calculated annually.

I own a stock. Bought 10 years ago, for $1000, and after 10 years it's worth $2000. No dividends, no interest, just growth in value. The increase over 10 years was 100%, and one might say the average increase was 10% per year. But, the true CAGR (compound annual growth rate) was 7.18%.

While I respect the others' answers, there's a similar math that applies here. The gain (or loss) each year is then part of the starting value the next year. 2 years of 10% gains don't result in 20% after year 2, but in a 21% gain.

The word 'interest' is wrong in this context, but compound growth does apply. In effect, I am ignoring the misuse of the word 'interest' and focusing on the math we use to discuss a long term change in the value of an asset.

The family house I grew up in was bought for $4000 in 1939. It's now worth $1.6M. A factor of 400X, but doing the math it's 80 years CAGR of 7.78%.

Note: Inflation can't be ignored when actually discussing such returns. S&P long term 10% CAGR? Well, 3% is lost to inflation. In the 80 years I cited, inflation ran 3.68% CAGR, yielding a 'real' CAGR of 4.1% for that house (which I do not own.)

To expand on comments I made critiquing @JoeTaxpayer 's answer:

Compound interest is a very specific method of calculating interest that produces a specific family of curves of returns, equivalent to exponential or geometric growth. It does not simply mean a really awesome rate of return.

If all you consider is your starting investment and your endpoint, you can't say whether your investment is equivalent to simple interest, compound interest, or something else. You can draw an infinite number of curves between any two points in a plane.

Consider three situations: $100,000 invested at 11% simple interest, invested at 5% compound interest compounded annually, or used to purchase an imaginary house in a volatile but upward trending housing market. The value of your investment over 30 years is shown on the graph below. Notice that all three have roughly the same starting point and end point, but don't look at all the same in the intervening years.

And of course if you'd bought a home in a depressed area, you might end up with a curve trending downward!

There is no compound interest on a home value. Here are a few examples:

• The First place I owned the value went up 10% in the first two years, then 20% the next year. Then it fell back to almost the original price, which made it impossible to sell, there were 10+ sellers for every buyer. So I was a landlord for almost 10 years and the price bounced around a narrow range. Then over the next 5 years the value doubled, I sold in that growth period. But ever since then the price growth has been slow.


• The second place I sold for 10K less than the purchase price 7 years later. A year later the price was 20% higher.


• The third place the price almost tripled in 8 years, then dropped 50% and is now a almost back to the previous highest value.

So no, home prices don't involve compound interest.

Stock investments also aren't compound interest. Even if they guarantee a dividend each year, there is no guarantee that the price per share will grow. If you reinvest the dividends then the number of shares will grow, but the overall value of the investment could be steady or even negative.

As others have noted, compound interest "works" because you collect interest, then reinvest it, then collect interest on the interest. If you withdrew the interest every year, you would not get compound interest. That is, if, say, you had a $100,000 investment that grows at 5% a year, then in the first year you make $5,000. If you reinvest that, you now have $105,000, so the next year you collect 5% of $105,000, not just 5% of the original $100,000. If you keep re-investing, year after year, the amount grows faster and faster because you are collecting interest on the interest on the interest. But if you withdrew the $5,000 profit and spent it, then the next year you would get 5% of the same $100,000, or another $5,000.

A house is really very different. The value of a house will increase for 2 reasons:

1. Inflation. This will compound as inflation builds on itself.




2. Increase in housing values. This is not investment growth, but the result of increase in demand over time. More people are being born or moving to the US than are dying, so in most built-up areas, the number of people is constantly increasing. But the amount of land is fixed, which limits the amount of housing that can be built. So there is continually increasing demand for the same supply.

But this is fragile. People can and do decide that housing prices have gotten too high so they'll live someplace else. Perhaps farther from the center of town, perhaps someplace else entirely. If prices get too high young people start deciding to live with their parents, or get smaller living spaces. Etc. So housing prices do not steadily increase. They go up and down erratically.