How Many Ounces of Gold Does It Take to Buy the Average House?

Investmenttools.com has some pretty interesting housing price graphs. One of them shows how many ounces of gold it has taken to buy the average house over the years.

Another shows how many shares of the Dow Jones Industrial Average it takes to buy the average house. It's interesting to note that chart looks very different from how many US dollars it takes to buy the average house. Back around 1980, it looks like it would have taken about 110 shares of the DJIA to buy the average house, whereas now it is more like 22 shares. This shows how much stock price increases have outpaced housing price increases over the past 25 years or so.

As a side note- amid all of the doom and gloom, the index fund that 60% of my 401(k) contributions are going into has returned 8.7% this year. It seems like the sky was falling for some reason or another every week this year (primarily because of subprime headlines). All of the resets, the foreclosures, the dollar falling etc... and yet a stock market index fund still quite handily beat returns on most other financial products such as CDs and savings accounts. Thanks to my modest allocation to international and emerging markets funds (up about 16% and 50%, respectively), my overall 401(k) portfolio is up 11.3% on the year. Not too shabby.