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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

#211

Post by lotsofpulp »

bityard wrote: post #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 c…

> Which they happen to be selling at 20% above true market value.

If carvana is not providing that value, then there should exist plenty of sellers that want a piece of that 20%, such as car dealerships and individuals themselves.

This is a market with plenty of buyers and sellers, and low transaction costs. I see no reason why Carvana would be able to corner it.

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

#213

Post by jtdev »

duxup wrote: post #124
yabones wrote: post #102

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…

Yeah what the heck happened there. "same cabal" Everything is a grand singular conspiracy to someone these days. Happens on HN too, every few bad news type post has some accusation that whatever outcome was because of a conspiracy.

Consider that you may be far too trusting if you’re not considering conspiracy as a possibility at this point…

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

#214

Post by no-dr-onboard »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #194
commandlinefan wrote: post #4

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…

> My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years How I know you don't live in California. You would love Prop 13 then that has capped the amount that property taxes can increase per year. Be careful though, your public schools and other services paid for by property taxes are going to suffer as the cash flow dries up....

Strange argument considering public schools (and in general _many_ public services) in CA are in terrible condition. Maybe I'm missing the point though.

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

#216

Post by throw737858 »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #170
cosmojg wrote: 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’ve ranted about this before but CA Prop 13 not only makes housing a good investment, but one that you’re extremely incentivized to hold onto forever and never move. Two people can be living in houses next to each other valued around 1.5m, and one of them will be paying 1/10th the tax. If anyone wants to buy a house, they have to first be able to afford the property, so the barriers to entry are so much higher for t…

California used cheap migrant work force for decades, but that stream is drying up. This pyramid scheme is one of reasons.

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

#217

Post by TheCowboy »

gfodor wrote: post #107
nathan11 wrote: post #29

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.

I follow this account and others like it because it allows one to be exposed to things like the idea that COVID leaked from a lab a year ago. Skepticism is warranted in all cases, of course, but I think it's extremely healthy to keep in tune with a variety of subcommunities who are in and of themselves skeptics of many mainstream narratives.

Conspiracy proponents act like the lab leak theory being true is some game changer. It's the stupidest thing. Even if it wasn't leaked, China sure did a lot to mess up and exacerbate the early response to the pandemic for the world. Additionally, people have been critical of wet markets in China from early on, one suspected source of where it first spread to humans.

I have no problem with investigating if it was a lab leak or anything else, but enough with trying to turn this into some political wedge issue that people wield as a cudgel against 'the sheeple'. Skepticism here isn't some neutral point of view.

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

#218

Post by brightball »

davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception.

We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land.

Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been the most dense townhome development in 4 counties.

There is uniform agreement that people want commercial projects built there as zoned, but I wonder if the opposition would be classified as NIMBY?

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

#219

Post by twobitshifter »

Spooky23 wrote: post #104
artificialLimbs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a popular notion for the redneck crowd. It never happens because it the math just doesn't work out. State/local revenues boil down to: property taxes, sales/use taxes, excise taxes, fees and income taxes. The big revenue streams are property taxes (schools, towns), sales taxes (county/state), and income taxes (state). Fees mostly sustain individual programs and have limited revenue potential - you can't make a f…

That makes sense but 14 states allow local governments to enact their own income taxes. This seems like an easy fix. The problem with property taxes is that they’re taxing wealth which is not creating monetary value which can be used to pay the fees.

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

#220

Post by kazen44 »

f6v wrote: post #53
adflux wrote: 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.

Isn't prefab a thing in the US? I have a hunch 3D printing won't solve the issue since you need not just walls, but plumbing, electricity, windows, doors, etc. Then again, imagine Blackrock or someone else just starts buying land. You're screwed anyway.

this,

if half of Europe could solve their housing crisis after ww2 thanks to plattenbau, so should the us.

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