Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

411–420 of 1001 posts

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

#411
I went on Zillow and looked at the house I'm renting (not in a major market) and it went up $28K in expected value in the last 30 days.

Can't see buying in this market at all. Fully expect my rent to be raised after my 1 year lease is up.

Who's improving what?

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

#412
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. Why would you be forced out? Yes, taxes on the underlying land would increase because it is more valuable, but you would be able to move into a new property in t…

It sounds to me like GP’s concern is that their LVT would go up (across the entire town) due to popularity and become unaffordable (forcing them out economically), rather than being concerned with increasing density.

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

#413
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

The real disaster (environmental and economic) is that so many places regulate parking so strictly rather than being more market-oriented and allowing people to figure out how much they want. https://www.planetizen.com/features/113459-perils-central-pl...

It's not really market oriented, it's tragedy of the commons oriented, as developers will build the cheapest thing they can on the premise that new residents can use existing parking, resulting in a reduction of value for others utilizing those commons. By not having parking minimums, it allows developers to pass those costs onto surrounding residents. There are townhouse neighborhoods near me with nearly impassable streets, people crossing 4 lane roads, spreading into surrounding areas, having to walk over 1km to their home from their parking due to insufficient parking minimums. Everyone sees it is a giant problem now, but it is too late to fix. These minimums are there for a reason.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "they"? Some article in a newspaper? A handful of researchers and futurists? Edit: Got it. It's from a list of unsurprising predictions from [at least] the marketing department of the World Economic Forum. Thanks.

It was from a series of predictions made by the WEF in 2016 about life in 2030[0]. The claim of many is that the WEF wants to bring about a world in which the vast majority of people don't have ownership. Reuters "fact checks"[1] this claim by saying that it was merely a prediction, and that it isn't actually a goal listed on their website. I find the fact check unpersuasive. The WEF says "you will be happy" about no…

It's pretty clearly just a provocative list of predictions and not a call to action. It's like a commercial from 1995 saying "You'll have a phone in your pocket everywhere you go". They're predicting it will be a major trend that consumers adopt because it will makes sense when it comes. It's not even that crazy of a prediction. There's loads of shit in my house that I use maybe once a year and I wouldn't mind sharing with others via drone.

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

#415

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 main reason the homes are being bought up is the lumber and steal costs. Right now, it would cost me $500k to build a house that last year would cost me $190k. Real quotes I got for a possible build. More details on what I’m seeing here: https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl... With that being the case and the dollar appearing to be weakening, it makes since for them to buy anything they ca…

We are refraining from building a deck due to lumber prices. Maybe next year.

Or I buy a mill and cut my own lumber. I’ve got plenty of trees I can take down and use.

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

#416
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…

> Support groups like https://yimbyaction.org/ if you want to 'stick it to the investors'. I’m pretty sure you’re not sticking it to investors if you support development. You might be sticking it to different investors.

Disincentivize the rent-seeking investors.

Incentivize the investors creating and selling something of value.

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

#417
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying taxes on unearned gains is not "driven out of your house". You can keep the house and pay taxes on the gains. > I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older. Yes, this is the problem. Extreme self-interest and entitlement to massive windfalls.

Prop 13 is a limits how much property tax can increase in a year. So hypothetically without prop 13 it would possible that the value of your house jumps 10x and then you're stuck with paying 10x the amount of property tax that year. I don't think we need to remove it completely but some adjustments like applicable only to a primary residence and not investment or commercial properties would probably go a long way.

Shouldn't pass on to your heirs either.

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

#418
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…

The Economist is a fan:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+land+value+ta...

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blackrock Vanguard et al have tremendous influence as shareholders even if it's via an index fund... see what they did to Exxon Mobil a few weeks ago!

Exactly right - BlackRock and other large indexers have no legal obligation to follow the recommendation of an independent adviser (like ISS, Glass Lewis) in a proxy contest, even for a passive fund. In most cases they passively anticipate the index provider's (S&P, Russell, MSCI, etc.) moves for corporate actions, but management elections for the board and executives are much more subjective as they don't influence the position itself (note that the manager can sometimes also be the index provider, like BlackRock = iShares). The smaller index managers almost exclusively follow the proxy adviser's recommendation because they don't have the resources to analyze board decisions for ~8,000 different companies.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Most proposals in this direction (e.g. Glen Weyl's "Radical Markets", [1]) make reasonable exemptions for basic personal needs, so people don't get thrown out of their (modest) homes or lose their personal belongings unexpectedly. The point isn't to kick you out of your village, it's to make speculative investments in real estate unattractive.

[1] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf

Post reply on HN