701–710 of 1001 posts
A bit late to the convo, but we literally just signed over the contract of our house in Austin. 5 days on the market, 4 offers, 1 family, 1 family trust, 2 investment firms. All offers 20-50k over asking, 0 conditions.
Congratulations!
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The California Tax Postponment Program prevents displacement of low income seniors and the disabled. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary.
These programs often have terrible red tape and even awareness problems. They also ignore people who aren’t seniors but may be going through temporary rough spots. I prefer to have the prop 13 rules fundamentally built in an applied to all primary residences as a measure to provide a more universal stability of a home.
Prop 13 is $30B (billion!) per year. Surely there are cheaper ways to fix the "red tape" and "awareness problems",
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…
Housing supply cannot, and never could fix the problem. There is no city or country in the world where this has ever succeeded.
The house prices are rising because of increasing financialisation of our economy, cheap credit and low interest rates.
700,000 people left London during pandemic, put prices keep rising.
If we offered 300 year long mortgages that get passed on to your next of kin, house prices would quadruple overnight. The price of a house has no relationship to it's utility, like it does for all other goods. You know you will always be able to sell it for more to the bext sucker.
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Why is it a joke? Your property value went up significantly, you are in fact a winner. Why should you get to shirk your responsibility to your community?
re-pasting from an earlier comment of mine: I say it is unjust for a fixed income senior citizen or disability insurance recipient to have their property tax base grow to a point where they must flee their home of decades. The callus answer is to force the person to sell and take their gains and move so a younger person with higher wages can afford their once-home. I think it is unjust to remove an older, less abled,…
Any senior citizen who owns their home (mortgage all or mostly paid off) can take out whatever size mortgage necessary to pay property taxes. Since it's backed by the house's larger value itself.
Who's making them "flee their home"...? That would only happen if it's already mortgaged to the hilt, but then they're already on the verge of losing it anyways.
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It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand
California and NYC have a declining population.
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The developer wants to build the densest housing in four counties with little parking, and nobody has asked the real question: is this planned as Section 8/affordable housing? It sounds like it. Section 8 is guaranteed income for the landlord and probably a headache for the neighbors, especially if they had no poverty in the area before. A very similar situation happened in my rural village, where a developer decided…
Where do you expect poor people to live exactly?
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I'd say the tax advantages have a lot to do with it to. A portfolio of several thousand Prop 13 jackpots is a pretty good situation to be in.
Makes me wish that they would increase property taxes for multiple residence owners & make sure to include residential conglomerates. It should be that each additional house after the first has a tax penalty that increases on a logarithmic scale to make it financially unsavory for people to own more than one house. In an ideal world, owning multiple homes would be an ostentatious display of wealth and not a common in…
I know Californians are sickened by the idea that taxes could go up when the house you live in is worth more but this happens all over the world and it's honestly just fine.
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And, at least in California, realtors will always push prices up. It’s pretty much never in their best interest to lower the price. Even the buyer’s agent gets paid a percentage of the sale price, so if they try to lower it they’d be essentially working against themselves. And this is without even accounting for all the schemes realtors create (like listing below market to get a lot of offers and create artificially…
Some of this is changing - I've heard that Redfin agents (who are employees - they don't split commissions the way other brokerages do) get paid a bonus structure that's tiered based on list price. So at the time they show you the house, the bonus they get if you buy it is already set, regardless what you pay for it. They still do have an incentive to show you more expensive homes, but they don't have an incentive to…
First, yes, Redfin agents don't get commissions the way traditional real estates agents get commissions. However, Redfin agents do still want to close as many deals as possible. Also, while real estate agents have a tough job finding good leads (especially given that leads don't exactly keep buying property) Redfin agents do not have a tough time finding leads (they have one phenomenal website that just gives them constant leads). What it results in is that a good traditional agent will put in a lot more work to find an appropriate place for you, because not only do they rely on you buying through them, but more importantly, they rely on you being happy enough that you recommend them to other people.
Redfin does not need your recommendations, as they've got a line out the door. So if anything starts getting difficult with your purchase, Redfin has no incentive to stick around and figure it out.
I've bought three properties and made an offer that fell through on one, and looked around other times. I've tried both traditional agents and a Redfin agent, and will never again work with Redfin.