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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

#341

Post by p_j_w »

ceres wrote: post #313
p_j_w wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is that no grand conspiracy is required, this is just a function (and an entirely predictable one) of the ever increasing levels of wealth inequality that we see. No political "pincher" movement required, it's just people with money finding ways to use that money to make more money. As an aside, this isn't a username I expected to ever see again.

>this isn't a username I expected to ever see again Mind if I ask what you mean by this?

duxup was a fairly prolific user on kuro5hin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin).

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

#342

Post by admissionsguy »

woodruffw wrote: post #187
world_peace42 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked it. Looks like he's a Republican and a Christian (and has pretty standard opinions for that intersection) who likes to write long political essays. Are you sure he's a nut job, or could you possibly just be a bigot?

COVID denialism, election denialism, and “The Great Reset” are high profile crank subjects. Being a conservative Christian doesn’t make you a crank; those things do.

From a purely logical viewpoint, it is a bit hilarious that you consider the objectively most outlandish of these beliefs to be the only non-cranky one. Although it is, admittedly, the most viable one socially.

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

#343

Post by opportune »

brightball wrote: post #218
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…

This is kind of textbook NIMBY although it is possible taking away the commercial zoning could make the area too light on commercial activity.

But one of the main contributors to housing shortages is that areas have been overly permissive with commercial zoning (since they don’t have residents, city expenditure is low) which causes imbalances in the amount of jobs:people in an area. That in turn not only increases prices but increases traffic as some portion of people must be commuting from afar to fill those jobs.

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

#344

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

66,781,000 Detached Single Family Homes in the US [0]

$272,400 median home selling price in the US, 2020 [1]

That's just over $18 Trillion for the entire US Detached Single Family Home market. I'd be interested to know how much Blackrock has budgeted for this fund (and how much of the spend is leveraged, and up to what number. And who else is doing the same type of fund and to what magnitude).

Note that per Statista, the median home price is anticipated to increase from $272,400 to $324,000 between Q4 2020 and Q2 2022. That's a 20% increase in real estate over an 18 month period. Given that we're seeing this story now, Blackrock likely executed these purchases many months ago. Their fund is likely leveraged, making the potential profits huge.

It looks like a very high-stakes play by Blackrock, which I know to be a hedge fund, so perhaps part and parcel of their business.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/377896/owner-occupied-ho...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272776/median-price-of-e...

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

#345

Post by arrosenberg »

plank_time wrote: post #275
arrosenberg wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may have been the case when Prop 13 was sold to the public, but at this point it's mostly being used to accumulate wealth, not keep people on fixed incomes in their lifelong homes. If that was the goal, there is a much better solution - let the elderly accumulate the tax bill against the value of the house, and collect from the estate when they pass.

When houses get sold, capital gains need to be paid. This is nothing new.

Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods, the older, wealthy, established residents are paying 1/3rd the taxes needed to support infrastructure and services, compared to newer, younger residents who are trying to establish a nest-egg and raise families without the benefits the older generations had. There is no one solution that will work for every neighborhood, but prop 13 is economic warfare on the young. Portraying it as young tech millionaires against poor, old retirees is not true for a large portion of those affected here in the present.

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

#346

Post by oh_sigh »

_greim_ wrote: post #142
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 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…

It's never appealing to make a long time member of a community leave because they can no longer afford the land they've owned for years, because other people say "I want that"

I move to a cheap, small town. I embed myself in the community and help build it up over decades. And then, at the peak popularity, in part due to my presence, I am forced out, because someone who has never been here says that they would like to live here.

You don't see a problem with this?

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

#347

Post by jdmichal »

jlmorton wrote: post #127
snikeris wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already pay a Land Value Tax to my town.

I'm not aware of any locality in the US that has a pure Land Value Tax. There are a few localities in Pennsylvania that have a split value tax, with separate rates for land and structures.

There are definitely counties here in Florida that value land and improvements separately. But there's often no separation as far as how they're taxed. It's just all added together. Here's the listing for Tropicana Field, which is owned by the county and therefore qualified as "municipal" use:

https://www.pcpao.org/?pg=https://www.pcpao.org/general.php?...

Just/Market Value: $108,535,551

Land Adjusted Value: $46,160,000

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

#348

Post by wolverine876 »

beforeolives wrote: post #291
bplatta wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, cabal is a strong word and the election stealing/truth hiding is certainly off the rails in my opinion as well. But here's some perhaps interesting information on top 5 shareholders of largest US banks [1]: JP Morgan Chase: Blackrock 6.4 Vanguard 4.7 State Street 4.5 Blackrock 2.7 Blackrock 2.5 Bank of America: Berkshire 6.9 Blackrock 5.3 Vanguard 4.5 state street 4.3 Fidelity 2.1 Citigroup: Blackrock 6.1 Vanguar…

Aren't most of these holdings through funds? It's not Blackrock, Vanguard or Fidelity that's holding those shares, it's people and institutions who are investing in their funds.

That's a necessary point, but who really has the power? What is the chance that the investors will pull out, especially if they are making a profit?

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

#349

Post by selectodude »

notahacker wrote: post #333
kasey_junk wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth noting those Black Rock holdings are almost certainly through indexed mutual funds and ETFs. If you calculated the ownership across all banks in the US Blackrock would not own nearly so high a percentage.

Also worth noting they have similar ownership stakes in other public companies for the same reason, and somewhat limited leverage over any of them because they can't threaten to pull their investment

Blackrock also owns over 6 percent of Apple. I wonder if this "great reset" includes buying everybody's iPhones.

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

#350

Post by shiftpgdn »

ljhsiung wrote: post #136
snikeris wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already pay a Land Value Tax to my town.

Only partially true. You pay a *property* tax, which does sometimes have a land component to it, but mostly is a tax on the purchase price of your home. A Georgist-style land tax proposes a tax on solely the land, so a 2000sq-ft lot is the same regardless of a $10mil home or not. This would require an appraiser that regularly re-evaluates the value of the land-- but we already do that! But with homes. Furthermore, a…

Texas (what the original article in the original post revolves around) has the 5th highest property tax in the country and the urban areas have some of the outright highest property taxes in the country on a per city or county basis. This is both a land value tax and property tax.
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