Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 1001 posts

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

#881

Post by abeppu »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #865
masklinn wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so supply > demand Nope. Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities). There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities bec…

>>>Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000. That's crazy to me, Tokushima in Shikoku was on my short list of "ideal relocation spots". With just a few hours of scenic driving, you can be in Kochi, Takamatsu, Matsuyama, Okayama, or Wakayama. All with…

> So you could easily geographically distribute 4-5 girlfriends across those towns

This comment took an unexpected turn. Why can you not have girlfriends in the same town?

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

#882

Post by crazygringo »

rich_sasha wrote: post #115
crazygringo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't see how you're complaining -- the value of your home is going up way more in absolute terms than the property tax you're paying. If you don't have cash, take out a small mortgage on the house to pay the property taxes. You'll still come out ahead in the end.

It's still a pain. And once you bought a house, you might like to think of it as an unmovable good (literally, in many languages). Now your cash flow doesn't permit you to live there. Also, with low/zero IR, PV of tax payments is infinite, it's not like increasing house price is offsetting that.

I mean, you're basically arguing against property taxes. Sure, property taxes are a "pain", but so are all taxes. But yes, that's literally how property taxes work -- you don't get to live somewhere infinitely long without paying property taxes.

In practical terms though, property taxes aren't infinite -- they're only for as long as you're alive. And you can realize your increasing house price while you're alive too (or your kids can). And I know people who have come out very much ahead in that equation in certain gentrifying areas, e.g. turning a $30K investment in 1985 into an $8M sale in 2020.

So within reasonable "non-infinite" time frames, an increasing house price can be very, very, very much offsetting property taxes. That's just a fact.

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

#883

Post by refurb »

te_chris wrote: post #717
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…

NZ has not got anything near price stability. It’s going mental as they all sell the same houses to each other over and over

Throwing Canada in the mix! We got excited over our 5%+ GDP growth in Q1 until we realize 4% of it was housing!

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

#884

Post by [deleted] »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #874
SavantIdiot wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your thoughts are incorrect. Portland, Ore. is facing a huge housing crisis because single-home zoning prevented increasing density. Without the ability to create more housing on existing land, there is a shortage. It's that simple. They recently passed a law allowing more dense developments, and that will create more supply. There are currently 10 apartment projects in flight in the city, so there is no cabal c…

Portland has an Urban Growth Boundary [1] that makes it very difficult (de-facto illegal) to build new housing on undeveloped land. That is a major cause of the housing shortage, but it was passed by people like you who wanted it to artificially densify the city. Current homeowners who want to maximize their house's value would be in favor of keeping the urban growth boundary (it restricts the supply of houses) and e…

[deleted]

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

#885

Post by scotuswroteus »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #879
scotuswroteus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Do better than this: "If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on." What's needed is a mainstream, national name-n'-shame strategy that identifies specific officials and offices that are causing the block in housing. Make the target highly specific and concrete, and ensure the messaging is big tent -- don't make it anti-municipal government. Make it anti-zoning. It's a waste of polit…

Maybe it's because people disagree with you--people who like where they live and don't prefer radical changes and ideas. Maybe you should go talk to some of them and learn about what they want and why they prefer stable policies. What you call "anti-housing" others call "pro-stability."

I think this assumes that diversity of opinion among an electorate is what's responsible for one movement's ineptitude. The movement to change zoning can improve AND reasonable people can disagree about it's outcome. If your only point is that there are pro-zoning people who disagree with me -- that point is obvious and does not conflict with anything I've said.

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

#886

Post by d110af5ccf »

sjg007 wrote: post #852
ed_balls wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if you just build it? What are the sanctions? Can you legalise it later?

They force you to tear it down. If you don’t they will and charge you for it. That being said there was one guy in LA who built a massive house called the enterprise I think. Edit: he lost in court and is being forced to demolish it.

I've never been able to wrap my head around why things work like this. If what you build isn't a nuisance to neighbors, houses the same number of people as before, and doesn't pose a safety or environmental hazard, what business is it of anyone else?

I've met a significant number of otherwise carefully law abiding people with various non-permitted remodels and even outbuildings. (I guess the latter won't work so well in the future now that we have regularly collected high resolution elevation maps). It really seems like something is wrong with how this is handled across most of the US.

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

#887

Post by refurb »

beiller wrote: post #842
markdown wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. I don't know about Japan, but that can't possibly be right about NZ. Nobody in our generation will ever be able to afford a home in Auckland. Land Value Tax sorely needed.

Same in Canada. I am in the top 3% of wage earners in the entire country and can not "afford" to buy. Average price is > 1 million. At > 1 million, a 20% down payment is required in cash. That would basically take my well balanced portfolio into pure real estate holdings not to mention a massive tax hit to sell 200k+ of my portfolio. I used quotes in afford because I could afford it, but I feel it would be a huge mis…

Sounds like you need to grow balls like your fellow Canadians and go “all in”. Most folks I know buying throw every dollar they have into a house plus a hundred thousand from the bank of mom and dad.

You’ll never be able to afford unless you do it.

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

#888

Post by seaourfreed »

Inflation is happening. Investors are buying houses before the inflation hits the home housing market.

Some people think inflation won't happening. These investors are betting incredible inflation, because this may be the first time where large scale investors are buying houses individually (except 2008 mortgage crisis).

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

#889

Post by sjg007 »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #886
sjg007 wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They force you to tear it down. If you don’t they will and charge you for it. That being said there was one guy in LA who built a massive house called the enterprise I think. Edit: he lost in court and is being forced to demolish it.

I've never been able to wrap my head around why things work like this. If what you build isn't a nuisance to neighbors, houses the same number of people as before, and doesn't pose a safety or environmental hazard, what business is it of anyone else? I've met a significant number of otherwise carefully law abiding people with various non-permitted remodels and even outbuildings. (I guess the latter won't work so well…

Building codes are written in blood.

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

#890

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #877
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #820

Sadly, archive.is is blocked in some countries For a smaller, simpler, Javascript-free, ad-free page curl https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801 \ |grep -Eo "( )|( )|( )" \ |tr -cd '[ -~]' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm

Looks like you need to set the user agent for this to work (I went with "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (K HTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36" and it worked)

curl is for examples on HN. In practice, I never use curl and I never send a user-agent header. If use -H"User-Agent" (no space after the H) it should work fine. Example below. I cannot even think of a single website that requires a user-agent header in order to retrieve a page, but if you send one it will likely be used for something. Fingerprinting, changing the "UI" and blocking are a few uses that come to mind.

    curl -H"User-Agent" https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801 \
    |grep -Eo "()|()|()" \
    |tr -cd '[ -~]' > 1.htm
    firefox ./1.htm
Post reply on HN