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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

#781

Post by motohagiography »

When you add the no-interest rate environment that creates price bubbles and mortgagtes where people never build significant equity, this destroys the ability of families to build wealth, it turns young people into urbanized share cropping serfs. I guess young people can look forward to owning nothing and being happy about it?

The only people who can compete to own property in an environment like this are the extremely wealthy, or those of very independent means. This marks the end of opportunity for generations of working people.

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

#782

Post by jbigelow76 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #574
BizarroLand wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The wealthy will just create a bunch of LLCs that own one house each.

Then single family homes owned by LLCs should be taxed out the ass. I know it's a cat and mouse game, but if a corporation is the owner of a home that should be a dead give away that it should be taxed at a higher rate than for one owned by an individual.

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

#783

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #780
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is not a normal rational market like a market for shoes, every ecobonist knows that much. 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…

False, false, and false. True, financialisation is a factor, combating that must be part of the solution.

"False" is a hell of an elaborate argument, very convincing when placed against 50 years of data across 5 countries, all leading to same skyrocketing housing prices.

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

#784

Post by JAlexoid »

rabuse wrote: post #767
JAlexoid wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah... That's just ignorance. It's like the American opposition to pedestrianization of blocks. Pedestrianized blocks increase local business footfall and increase high margin economic activity. New developments in your community increase value of your home, far better than restricting development.

How's that? Genuinely curious.

Opposition to development hurts the homeowners value, a lot.

The value of your home doesn't only depend on the fact that it's in a rich neighborhood with beautiful lawns, but the services and proximity to said services.

NYC is desireable, not because it's a big city... but because you can get services there. Take away the services - you take away all of the value proposition.

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

#785

Post by adflux »

Justsignedup wrote: post #461
JamesBarney wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you believe that no town homes should be built in the U.S. than you might not qualify as NIMBY. But if you believe that town homes shouldn't be built next to you that's the definition of NIMBY. Of course every instance has a long list of reasons why next to them is especially bad, character of the neighborhood, parking issues, infrastructure, etc.... But the end result of everyone fighting increased density i…

The irony is that density means more people, more homes, more availability. That means more jobs open up and makes the place more lively. More desireable. That means the house property value will go up. They are thinking "will this make the property value go down in the next 5 years"? vs "will this make the property value skyrocket in the next 10 years". We are catering to short-term gains at the expense of long-term…

Exactly. Parents bought a house in relatively scarcely populated area. Then 10000 neighbours moved in. Now they own the largest property in the neighborhood. Guess what that does with the price...

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

#786

Post by epistasis »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #735
epistasis wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you are using derisive terms like "stack and pack" for apartments then you are probably precisely the investor that is manufacturing the housing crisis. Apartments create greater affordability, they allow for designing cities with lower carbon impact than single-unit homes, they allow better community, more connections, cradle-to-grave living, they allow people to survive without having to get in a car to…

Your points are true, and I’m in favor of building more housing, however the single family home has traditionally been a financial boon for lots of Americans, and having to pay for rent every month vs keeping some of that value in your mortgage is hard to discount. I guess I’m just saying there should be cheap smaller houses and condos in cities too, not just rental places.

It's weird, people say the same things whether it's condos or apartments. Where I live, they will typically be derided as "luxury condos" despite being less than half the price of detached homes in the area.

(One of my more heretical opinions is that homes and land shouldn't be considered investments, and should perhaps not be a method of wealth building, as it turns every person into an investor whether they want to be or not. Which fuels regular people to take control of the local political processes that block new homes with talk of "luxury condos" and "stack and pack." If we are going to do something like this I'd favor a sovereign wealth REIT that redistributes the wealth more evenly and removed the financial incentive to be anti-competitive in land use decisions. That, or tax away all profits from speculation on land gains.)

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

#787

Post by bennysomething »

p_l wrote: post #642
bennysomething wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops c…

Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide. One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that…

I live in Edinburgh in Scotland. Best feature is tenement flats with shops or bars below. Old town is especially mixed use and it's brilliant because of it.

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

#788

Post by juloo »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #344

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,…

Median != mean. Multiplying it literally means "The value of this particular house I know nothing about times 66 millions".

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

#789

Post by zip1234 »

maxsilver wrote: post #510
brightball wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. Why? That's kind of an important point. For example, unless this is NYC or similar, 49 townhomes is going to need a minimum of at least 110 parking spots (just to hold the occupants alone, assuming no one ever has guests ever). A realistic parking minimum should be 2.5 spots per townhouse. A lot of builders outsource their pollution to the local neighborhood,…

Parking minimums should not exist, for about 1000 reasons. For further reading on the topic, check out 'the high cost of free parking'. They are a failed experiment from the mid-20th century.

Many places are switching to parking maximums instead of minimums.

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

#790

Post by harambae »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #344

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,…

>It looks like a very high-stakes play by Blackrock

In what sense? That housing could collapse in price after they made a large investment in it (and since housing is a huge market, Blackrock could have leveraged up to a higher amount than typical)?

Market cap of Apple is over $2 Trillion, they could have leveraged pretty far into this too.

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