Lindley Coetzee

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Namibia's housing market priced in bitcoin

Cryptocurrency
Saturday, February 3, 2024

Introduction

Before I start, I would like to stress that bitcoin is not a legal tender in Namibia. The only currencies one may transact with in Namibia is the Namibian dollar and the South African rand. In this post I will attempt to measure the Namibian housing market against bitcoin. At the end one can determine how much bitcoin it takes to buy a house in Namibia.

Dataset

To perform the calculations I needed the prices of bitcoin, the Namibian housing index and the USD/NAD exchange rate for 2014 to 2022.

You can access the data from the below:

Housing

I used the median of the 5 most expensive housing prices with there respective cities/towns. See the below table.

Bitcoin

Now lets add the bitcoin prices for the same period. Since the Namibian housing index is published in March we will use the median price of bitcoin for the month of March for each year. The same goes for the USD/NAD exchange rate. We need this in order to calculate the price of bitcoin in Namibian Dollars.

Chart

Now that we have the median house prices and the prices of bitcoin in Namibian Dollars, all we have to do is to divide the former by the latter. This will tell use how much bitcoin we need to buy a house in Namibia. Below is a combo chart showing a line chart and a bar chart. The line shows the house prices and the bars show how much bitcoin is need to buy a house in Namibia.

Conclusion

The above shows that the house prices has moved upward from 2014 to 2019 but started a decreasing trend from 2020. The chart also shows that in the last 2 years(2021 and 2022) you need less than 2 bitcoin to buy a house in Namibia. This is a way less than the previous years where you needed between a maximum of 336.92 bitcoin and a minimum of 8.65 bitcoin. That 8.65 bitcoin would easily get you 4 houses in 2022! Until next time.