There’s just something funny about someone spending time figuring this out.

The first problem with calculating the effect of a Rapture on real estate lies in determining how many people would actually disappear. Predictions range from 144,000 — about 0.0024% of the world’s population, to about half of us, the amount of people who were left behind in Tim LaHaye’s series. However, even if an average of 50% of Americans manage to stay around after Rapture, it seems likely that the post-Rapture numbers would vary wildly from region to region.
[…]
In New York City, for example, a 49% drop would reduce the city’s population to 1910 levels. In the short run, this would cause property values to plummet in the city, but the effects would quickly spread beyond mortgages and rents. […] Effectively, he argues, this would turn the clock back 40 years or more, to an era in which low rents made it much easier for middle-class residents to choose neighborhoods based on preference, not price.

Outside of urban centers, Schiller suggests, Rapture would likely be a final nail in the foreclosure coffin, as “People holding on by their fingernails would be more willing to let go of their houses.” […] Municipalities, facing large stretches of empty houses, might be inclined to adopt the solution that Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, are currently pursuing: “tearing down old homes and seeking adaptive uses for the land.”

This is assuming a post-Rapture world in which the political and economic systems would remain relatively stable — admittedly, a somewhat unrealistic expectation. For that matter, it seems likely that the remainder of humanity, having seen half of its number called into heaven, would be inclined to draw more closely together, further accelerating urbanization. However, even if everything else stays the same, one thing is clear: The Rapture would have an apocalyptic effect on real estate.




  1. bobbo, Republicans are all Lying Scum Suckers says:

    I don’t see any “calculation” going on–just speculation and bloviation of the most common unimaginative type with the important questions just assumed: “If civilization held together….” Where is the calculation in that?

    Rapture, dogma, unthinking, no change. Do it again. Some calculating really ought to be done.

  2. Yankinwaoz says:

    It would be far more realistic to speculate about the impact of a pandemic that kills X percent of the population in a short amount of time. For example, look at the Black Death that wiped out over 30% of Europe’s population in 2 years.

    If you insist on speculating what impact a rapture would have on real estate, then you should also factor in the rest of the rapture legend, which tells of massive destruction, wars, pestilence, famine, etc. Those would have a far larger impact on real estate.

  3. Benjamin says:

    Real estate prices? Are you kidding? There will be no money after the Rapture. They just scan the barcode on your forehead or wrist. Not to mention the famine, pestilence, and wars.

  4. bobbo, Republicans.......................why? says:

    #2–Yank==the curious calculation about the Black Death is that it ended the feudal system and started/supported the growth of the middle class. All flows from the creation of a shortage of labor thus creating more bargaining power in the laboring class.

    what would happen today? The issue hangs on just what people go and the resulting technology that fails by their absence. The world could easily do without billions of people consuming its resources but get rid of the 10,000 Nuclear Plant engineers, technicians, operators and there goes the energy grid, power supplies, gas distribution etc and the collapse of civilization. Some aspects of civilization are robust, others very thin.

    Amusing.

  5. Mr. Fusion says:

    As far as real estate, there would be a lot of cheap churches on the market. Not so much caused by their parishioners being “called home”. More because they realize that aren’t being called home so why bother with the bull crap.

  6. Uncle Dave says:

    I’m guessing that they took the reports prepared by FEMA or DOD or whoever on what would happen after a plague or other massive die off and changed ‘plague’ to ‘rapture’.

    And Fusion, there a lot of good uses for vacant churches.

  7. Thomas says:

    Unlike in the middle ages, the technology for rapid communication and travel would still exist after the loons went off to cultivate pot plants. Humans might move closer only in that the ability to purchase homes closer to their work would be within reach of more people. However, if presumably only the Christians are vacuumed up, that is going to leave a lot of Chinese and Indian labor.

    I wonder. Is the rapture supposed to include the Muslims?

  8. Thomas says:

    #6
    Uncle Dave, nice! The first thing you’d have to do when you and your wife moved in is to do it where the alter once stood. Still, it’d get kind of creepy starting at those stained glass windows every day.

  9. Mr. Fusion says:

    As for any quick population reduction, there would be immediate, though short term, consequences throughout society. While the whole population might be reduced, the reduction most likely would not be evenly spread across all of America or its sectors. There might be more, or fewer, delivery drivers per capita then before. 7-11 shop owners could be wiped out in-proportionately. Or farmers, policemen, dairy workers, butchers, teenage cheerleader porn stars, and arbitrage traders. Eventually, there would be an evening out of occupational workers. Many service workers/sectors though would disappear while others would burgeon.

  10. Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

    I have to agree with Uncle Dave that it’s funny to see people spending time making these projections. If the Rapture were to occur, it would simply show that logic has no value whatsoever as a tool to assess reality, much less predict future real estate trends.

  11. jdmurray says:

    One important aspect of the after-affects of the Rapture is who gets “raptured” and why. As I understand it, just having been baptized as a kid isn’t enough to get you raptured. You must also be a devote Christian for at least part of your life.

    Women tend to be the majority of the devote, church-going folk in most cultures. If the majority of raptured folk are disproportionately female, the 50/50 male/female balance we now enjoy may be tipped to a point where brides become a commodity once again.

  12. Floyd says:

    Alfie–from what I know of religion, the preachers and priests will be the ones left behind.

    From another point of view, their parishioners might stay on Earth as a reward for putting up with the religious for all those years.

  13. therupture says:

    That picture is FAKE! Everybody knows your clothes stay behind.

  14. JimD says:

    Nah !!! Everyting would be TIED UP IN PROBATE COURT !!! With God called as a Material Witness !!!

  15. msbpodcast says:

    Rapture, zombie apocalypse, plague, flu pandemic, asteroid impact like the Chicxulub one 65 million years ago, mega-volcanic eruption like the Yellowstone caldera which last went off 640,000 years ago, 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.

    It doesn’t matter. It would cause rapid change and humans don’t do well with rapid change…

    The effects of a single catastrophe are truly hard to gauge, like the tsunami which would race across the Atlantic from the collapse of the caldera of Las Palmas in Tenerife, sending the entire side of the mountain into the ocean.

    There are myriad factors but the death toll, the property loss, the loss of arable land, crop damage, destruction of cities, towns and villages, roads and industrial physical plant would depend on the shapes of beaches and coastlines all along the eastern seaboard.

    If Japan has taught us anything, it has given us a warning that while we can build structures that can survive 9.0 earthquakes, the destructive power of water is inestimable.

  16. Dallas says:

    Dilemma for me as I’m bidding on a foreclosed rental property on June 7th. With the rapture rescheduled for Oct 21st, this should cause additional value erosion from by mid limit.

    I’m very skeptical this date will hold given Halloween being 10 days away.

  17. NobodySpecial says:

    According to the DoJ there are 110,000 active missing person records in the USA.

    So assuming that only 1 in 3000 are worthy of being saved perhaps the rapture happened and we didn’t notice?

  18. Animby says:

    Pardon my scant knowledge of rapture procedure but aren’t the few months following the rapture supposed to be times of major cataclysm, earth-rending tremors, insane floods, plague, pestilence, war?

    Yeah. Real estate will drop, alright. Probably to free… if you can find some.

  19. Bob73 says:

    Typical ignorance. The rapture is going to be a spritual event, not a physical event. Think about what that means.

  20. Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

    Hahahahaha!!! The worst fear that some people have about heaven is that it may be (shudder) EGALITARIAN, and perhaps just as bad, have no view of the suffering in Hell. Nothing robs Heaven of its appeal like having no constant reminders of your superiority.

  21. Howard Beale says:

    so the only honest brokers are the soon to be raptured christians then population will consists of dangerous infidels stealing all they can…and putting maids at every hotel in danger

    Taxed Enough Already Dude
    Arguments fail based upon what we know about religion and christians and history maids hotels and danger.

    I love free speech sometimes Alf is funner then Colbert

    go on dude what else you got

  22. Colorado says:

    Housing would cost ZERO. Just move into one of the many vacant houses. If someone tried to charge you, just move down the street to the next vacant house. There could be some valuable real estate if it was productive like farm land but the market for the goods would be cut in half. One of the unexpected results of the black plague was that productive lands and other things were concentrated in the hands of fewer people making them proportionally richer. Then the culture took off. The article lacks even common sense economics and is basically BS.

  23. Uncle Dave says:

    You know, Alfred, since the majority of the religious tend to be older, Medicare should be just fine as there would be more young people (who are trending away from religion, and thus, unrapturable) to pay for us older folks who are still here.

    In other words, Medicare is saved by the rapture!

  24. George says:

    Real Estate prices is nothing if you really want to entertain this idiotic idea.

    What about all the abandoned property? Stocks, bonds, bank accounts, vehicles, loan accounts, mortgages etc. The law necessarily wouldn’t respect “rapture” as a legal concept for appropriating property without just title. All the “raptured” would need to be declared dead after some statutory period, following which the probate courts would be swamped with claims for the property. The numbers of intestate raptured would be astronomical. Even those raptured with a will probably wouldn’t have anticipated that their heirs would also have been raptured. Whole families may have had no remaining named heirs. Probating all this would have been a nightmare.

    Unpaid loans going into default would result in judgements and resulting liens against the remaining property.

    The life insurance companies would have all gone under, under the idea that those raptured would have been treated as missing/presumed dead.

    Since lawyers arguably will not go to heaven, being of Satan’s seed, they will end up with the lion’s share of the “raptured” property after probate and other legal fees are settled up after the millions and millions of probate hearings and judgements are settled.

  25. Vaquero says:

    Let’s speculate on how many angels will fit on the head of a pin, while we are wasting our fucking time with this nonsense.

  26. 1911....100 years of perfection says:

    And, incidentally, Bobbo, you really should adjust your medications. I am seeing some disturbing trend in your irrational hatred of a political party, and strangely expressed in the name you use, changing from post to post.
    Can you say, “obsessed”, “paranoid”, “disturbed”?
    You could fulfill a good purpose, however. I am sure there is a Psychology PhD candidate out there who would really appreciate you as a thesis subject…

  27. fred says:

    Looking at Uncle Dave’s picture, what fascinates me is the geometry of the situation. To become enraptured (sic) one apparently has to shoot vertically up into the air. This means that an Australian will set off in the opposite direction to that of a European. So, do they all meet up around the back somewhere – or only at infinity? Where is heaven located exactly and why is it always supposed to be in the direction of ‘up’?

    Question, questions and nary an answer.

    All very confusing.

  28. Skeptic says:

    Imagine heaven without a body and bodily senses. Total nothingness, not even awareness… a function of the brain, that has long since rotted or burned to ashes. You may as well be… um… dead.

  29. Cursor_ says:

    Outside of orthodox Christians, most American ones will be left behind.

    The American Christian stance on wealth, marriage, divorce and remarriage precludes many of them going to Heaven.

    So we’d be lucky if we saw 100k go.

    Cursor_

  30. bobbo, The Rupture.......................really? says:

    A nice little bible review is here:

    http://biblebell.org/proph/rapture1.html

    All the specific detail in a made up story is shocking every time I take occasion to dip into the roots of our Christian Nation. My ignorance abounds though and gives me great comfort. So god/jebus floats in the sky rapturing who he chooses. From the book of Thessonolians (sp?) Now this and what follows sounds uber-crazy, judgmental, violent, etc. so I take it this is from the Old testament? And I even remember the word is originally Hebrew so probably the Old Testament. don’t most modern christians dismiss the Old Testament as…well….”old?”

    Anyway, I found this amusing from the first page of the link: “Then Jesus was raptured into heaven, where He now sits at the right hand of God.” /// I thought Jebus was just a kind of manifestation of god for certain limited situations, as is the Holy Ghost, but this passage permanently splits God into two parts, I don’t know about the Holy Ghost. How does “anyone” make sense out of this. I know the Trinity of God is a fine theological subject for the followers of god but……really?

    Silly hoomans. Beyond redemption, yet the only option is to soldier on.


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