321–328 of 328 posts
Why would current owners have to pay more and more in taxes just because Chinese fucks decided to invest their laundered money in real estate here?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11614582 and marked it off-topic.
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You're right, it's the equivalent of a right handed turn in the UK. Consider an intersection between two perpendicular streets that is controlled by traffic signals. A protected turn is one in which the turn through the intersection and across the oncoming lane of traffic happens when the oncoming traffic (that is going straight) is stopped. An unprotected turn is one in which the turn through the intersection and ac…
I'm from LA and didn't realize the unprotected left turn was anything unusual...
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There are plenty of property management & other real estate firms in Vancouver which cater to foreign owners. But the math on renting isn't actually so straight forward. A 10-20 year old building in Vancouver will have many units with kitchens that have literally never been used. There's wear and tear and a lot of extra work and risk that comes from renting a place. And as odd as it may sound, the resale value can ta…
So, if I may summarize, you're saying that there's a lot of demand for safe-haven assets by investors whose priority is capital preservation? I don't see the math on this working out. Have you been in a house that hasn't been occupied? Things depreciate : roofs leak, water pipes break, floors rot, bugs get in, etc. Given a sane property rights regime (something notably absent from San Francisco), I would vastly prefe…
For single family detached, the value of the building is not a big deal. It's the dirt the building sits on that people are buying. Prices went up ~30% over the last year in Vancouver.
There are also buyers who think nothing of tearing down a relatively new building because it's not quite what they want.
As long as the city remains a place people wish to live, the dirt will retain value. Perhaps it goes down 50-80% - you can live on your land or you can use its cash flows to help cover your living expenses. As a safe-haven, it's not a bad option.
The price in CAD/USD/EUR/CNY/XBT is almost irrelevant to these owners.
The problematic purchasers in my view are the locals. Many are buying because the market is going up - "I'd better buy now or I'll never be able to afford it". In a falling market, that demand many not exist.
Though I also remain unconvinced that the foreign demand will remain strong in a falling market.
What's going on in Vancouver isn't sustainable in any traditional sense. But the market can also remain irrational longer than many can remain solvent.
I agree that the phenomenon of properties remaining vacant represents a failure. I'm curious what opportunities you think there are. I suspect that many of the opportunities would require regulatory changes to be viable, but I'm open to a different perspective.
Regarding Chinese people understanding capitalism, I suspect there's a very different view culturally. I'm told that the advertising for financial products is quite different - in North America we tend to expect a convervative branding. In China you'll see investments with more of a WeChat approach (including being actually promoted on WeChat). Property rights were recently codified in China - i.e. 2007 or 2008. Real estate is mostly only available as leasehold in China. There's a lot of people who recently became quite wealthy quite quickly. I think it's very likely that they have very different understandings of capitalism than North Americans, who also have a different understanding than Europeans.
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I'm an American who grew up on the East Coast, went to USC (Los Angeles) for university (left in 1990), later worked for a San Fran company and have been living in Prague for 15 years so I may have some perspective for you. Long story short, LA and San Fran are fantastic for single people or married working couples w/out kids. Once kids enter the equation, your perspective changes. You are not going to find cheap, go…
Glad to see fellow Prague expat here! Thanks a lot for the insight. What made you to move to Prague? We go to PBS here, and I've found private schools in LA to be less expensive. So, I guess, this part of the equation is solved, assuming I maintain the income (argh!) although I expect my overall expenses to double in LA with all the taxes, etc. I visited both LA and SF once and found traffic to be manageable in both…
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Don't go to Austin. Come to Boise, Idaho instead. https://www.tsheets.com/living-in-boise/ (I don't work for T-Sheets but have friends that do.) We have a great high tech community that is searching hard for more engineers. Great outdoor activities for those few minutes you want to spend away from your keyboard. Low traffic, good wages, great biking environment, decent weather. Move to Boise!
"We have a great high tech community" I've been seriously considering moving back to Boise (lived their 05-09). Can you name a few companies or startups that are part of the scene?
Lots of small tech companies here.
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Freeloaders & moochers are making everything more exclusive, expensive and pretentious? How does that work? More importantly, if they have it so nice, why don't get what you're due and start freeloading?
Freeloaders are driving up costs, due to the oversupply of people and unmet demand for housing and finite goods and services. The pretentiousness it simply a cultural function of the types of people that are being attracted to Austin; a mixture of internet douchbags that have ever increasingly proliferated adn infested SXSW, which are largely made up of the west coast and big city self-righteously self-absorbed. If y…
Freeloading is taking advantage of goodwill without returning the favor. I don't see how driving up the market price of housing is freeloading.
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So, if I may summarize, you're saying that there's a lot of demand for safe-haven assets by investors whose priority is capital preservation? I don't see the math on this working out. Have you been in a house that hasn't been occupied? Things depreciate : roofs leak, water pipes break, floors rot, bugs get in, etc. Given a sane property rights regime (something notably absent from San Francisco), I would vastly prefe…
For condo towers, things are mostly going to be OK even if no one is living in the unit. You pay your strata fees & the strata takes care of most of the things which become a problem simply due to the passage of time. For single family detached, the value of the building is not a big deal. It's the dirt the building sits on that people are buying. Prices went up ~30% over the last year in Vancouver. There are also bu…
I'm not at all a Marxist (pretty pro-capitalism in general) but this does strike me as a case of over-financialization. Wasn't there some Marxist/socialist line of thinking that in late capitalism, so much gets accumulated that the economy shifts from one oriented around socially useful production of goods ("socially useful" is the broad sense, anything people want), to a purely financialized system driven more strongly by investment returns vs. profits from production?
I recognize there's always an element of balance between starting a company to satisfy the demand for goods vs. the demand for return, but cases like this make me think the investors are more in the driver's seat than marketers/product people thinking about what we should make.
Sort of like there's this giant mass of passive capital chasing yield and there isn't enough to go around. And I think this view is consistent with the idea that asset ownership isn't backed by a legally sound property rights regime in China. It seems a lot of this would be fixed if they could channel more accumulated domestic capital (profits) into housing, business equity formation, or even consumption.
It's funny to think that "make something people want" (YC truism) might be good investments, rather than products. But maybe true here?
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Glad to see fellow Prague expat here! Thanks a lot for the insight. What made you to move to Prague? We go to PBS here, and I've found private schools in LA to be less expensive. So, I guess, this part of the equation is solved, assuming I maintain the income (argh!) although I expect my overall expenses to double in LA with all the taxes, etc. I visited both LA and SF once and found traffic to be manageable in both…
My kids to go Meridian, which so far has been a fantastic school and is about 1/3 the price of a private school in the U.S. (I see that PBS is almost as expensive as ISP, which is very high). What is your citizenship? Any issues with moving to the U.S.? My advice would be to go for 3 months and try it out (maybe in the summer when the kids are out of school). All I can say is that I loved living in LA, but I would ne…