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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

#141
post #100
post #90

> Home equity is the main financial element that middle class families use to build wealth, and black rock, a federal reserve funded financial institution is buying up all the houses to make sure that young families can’t build wealth. Faulty logic. First, though historically people have used home equity to build wealth, that hasn't been the best method of building wealth. Most of those people would have been better…

>> Most of those people would have been better off continuing to rent and investing in the stock market instead. It's hard or impossible for individuals to get 5 to 1 leverage at low interest rates for investing in stocks.

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

#142
post #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 wit…

I recently went down the Geoist/LVT rabbit-hole myself. It strikes me as uniquely appealing across the political spectrum, since it reduces tax on wealth-creation AND redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor.

Sadly, this very fact provokes enough superficial resistance to keep it out of the Overton window. Whenever it comes up, shouters on either side have plenty of ammo to blast it, saying things to the effect of "how could you propose giving the other side what they want!?!"

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

#143
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the disruption will come from the civil planning side of the equation. When we can figure out how to build a city on the edge of Arizona that people actually want to live in then we can begin to leverage more efficient and automated building techniques like 3d printing houses and stuff. It takes more than houses; also entertainment, food, infrastructure, jobs, etc. Otherwise, you're 100% right, location is ki…

Like this? https://archive.curbed.com/2019/5/31/18639098/california-cit...

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has. IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit th…

Something like this would effectively bar any person born in India who tried to immigrate to the U.S. in the last ~5 years from ever buying a house, unless they got married to a citizen. Broad strokes, I agree that residency requirements might help with reducing speculative investment, but maybe phrased in terms of how long you're in the country, not literally permanent residency as a legal threshold.

Not necessarily - for example in China foreigners are limited to owning one house. That limits speculation but does not provide hindrance for someone honestly trying to live.

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

#145
A.k.a. The Carvana model. This is what Carvana and other "no-haggle, no-test-drive" startups are doing with the whole used car market in many areas. They aggresively buy up all the used cars in an area (or at least as many as they can) from dealerships and private sellers in order to make themselves the only entity with used cars for sale. Which they happen to be selling at 20% above true market value. But hey, you can buy the car from an app on your phone without the burden of haggling with a salesman or even a test-drive!

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

#146
post #113
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people say "Well, you're paying more but you can also sell it for more afterwards". But non-homeowners are still paying more for less. That's the argument I am trying to make (poorly)

My rent doesn't change with interest rates.

That's true, rent keeps going up?

A fixed loan doesn't change with interest rates either.

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

#148
post #94
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non homeowners are paying way more whilst getting less in return. I really dont understand the logic of being OK with paying double for a house, just because the buyer can sell it for the same amount (or higher) afterwards. I could purchase a 150m2 house with my salary a decade ago. Now I could find a 75m2 house that would be too expensive for me. I dont care about being able to sell the house for more money afterwar…

> paying double for a house Are you talking about monthly payment or lump sum? When the lump sum doubles yet the monthly payment is the same, has the cost really changed? To me, no. I was never going to buy lump sum, so I only care about monthly payment.

>When the lump sum doubles yet the monthly payment is the same, has the cost really changed?

Yes of course it has. You've just over doubled (interest rates are low but they're not nil) the time it's taken to pay back that loan.

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

#149

Things went off the rails at the end... > Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth? You are fucked. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402449561864577024 IMO, weakens the entire 'thread' and m…

The whole thread is off the rails, just conspiracy and rumour

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

#150

Probably worth pointing out this twitter account is promoting the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. To me that casts suspicion on their other assertions.

Dismissing someone because they hold a viewpoint you disagree with is childish and dangerous to our society. By that logic we should all be dismissing CNN reporting because they were peddling Covington kids and russian collusion among other things proven to be false. We should all be striving to take in all sources of information and use our best judgement to judge and interpret them.
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