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If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

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Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#31
post #26

I really wish we'd get some innovation in the housing market. 3D printing of houses or something could be epic. "Just" disrupt the current construction companies... It's clear they can't keep up with the demand right now.

Location matters too. I don’t think the problem is making a log cabin in the woods.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#32
If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often without renting anything out) that it is in their economic self-interest to block any such proposals. Although, I suppose this situation isn't unique. The world has long been doomed by coordination problems.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#33

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

This is why CA has prop 13 which limits increases to property taxes from year to year specifically because CA had seem property boom/bust cycles kicking people out of homes because of irrational real estate prices.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#34

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

Property taxes do not have to go up because the assessment goes up. I have had assessments go up, but the tax rate go down because the town did not increase its budget. In the long run it probably will though, since higher land values will probably cause increases in wages and other costs. But it does not have to be proportionally as much as the land value increase.

The government has a claim to your property. The government is strongly influenced by lobbyists. The government is also gerrymandered.

The government always needs more money.

Why would your property taxes not continue to go up endlessly?

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#36
post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

upvoting but also this just feels like yet another contributing factor to the accumulation of wealth that was happening anyways.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#37
post #24

Sidestepping all the emotional comments. It's open market. Adopt to it. 1. Build more homes. 2. Sell to Blackrock or whatever at 2x or 3x your cost. 3. Profit!

Have you tried 1 in most places?

No lot availability. No materials to build the house. No workers available to build the house. Etc.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#38

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

Arkansas has a petition going around right now to axe property taxes completely. I believe other states do not have property taxes already as well.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#39

[flagged]

Sure, but that should be land held in the commons, not private home ownership. Private homeownership is just LARPing owning real capital to placate a new conservatized middle class, completely inefficient as rising prices cannot spur more land production and in fact preclude intensification use since the middle class homeowners don't have real capital to convert to apartments (even if zoning was relaxed), and histori…

> Private homeownership is just LARPing owning real capital to placate a new conservatized middle class

If you don’t own real productive capital and depend on it broadly ad much as sale of labor, you aren’t even in the middle class to start with, your in the working class—just LARPing, to use your term, being part of the petit bourgeoisie.

Of course, LARPing as a member of the petit bourgeoisie is the perennial pastime of a substantial portion of the upper income segment of the proletariat, especially the proletarian intelligentsia.

> rising prices cannot spur more land production

Sure they can, both literally (artificial land is a real thing, and its production is spurred by demand running into supply constraints) and more importantly economically (as “land”, the valued commodity, isn’t just raw square footage of the dry surface of the earth, but a product of access to infrastructure which makes it economically useful.)

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