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

901–910 of 1001 posts

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

#901

Post by RHSeeger »

Clewza313 wrote: post #869
RHSeeger wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

You've got it exactly backwards. Density is cheaper and more sustainable than running miles and miles of brand new sewerage, roads etc into spread-out suburbs. The big difference between Japanese and American cities is that Japan is built for trains, which scale up really well, and the US is built for cars, which don't.

I don't have it backwards, you're just not following what I'm saying. I agree that denser housing and construction in general is far more efficient. However...

I'm not talking about constructing a town from scratch. I'm talking about an existing town. Adding the infrastructure for high density housing to a town that wasn't originally designed for it is very expensive.

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

#902

Post by darren_ »

ipaddr wrote: post #679
vladgur wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that development was walking distance to transit? I live in SF Bayarea suburb in a SFH with a wife and a elementary school aged kid. We have 1 car that is parked in our driveway(on our property). For everything else there is a commuter train within 10-15minute walk and uber within reach. Limited parking does incentivize non-car-oriented lifestyle. Im all for it.

I'm all in for subways everywhere but do you feel as comfortable getting in a rush hour car after covid? I'm starting to think subways and megacities might not be the safest way to live.

I do actually feel safe getting in public transit while covid’s ongoing, and I’m in Tokyo (and taking two of the busiest lines in the world as part of my commute - Chuo and Yamanote).

At this point it seems obvious to me that having windows open, everyone wearing masks, and everyone shutting up, is sufficient to make public transit safe. Because if it wasn’t Tokyo would be in a _much_ worse situation. I fully admit I don’t have rigorous data to back this up, but I kind of can’t see how it could be otherwise.

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

#903

Post by jjeaff »

nibles_and_bits wrote: post #895
rwcarlsen wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick…

Why did you buy a lot zoned ag when you clearly wanted one zoned residential? A little due diligence before purchasing the lot and you would either know what you in for and still buy or decide it's too much of a hassle and walk.

They probably bought a lot smaller than 40 acres and assumed that logically, a single dwelling would be allowed since otherwise a dwelling would be impossible.

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

#904

Post by mook »

RHSeeger wrote: post #831
joe_the_user wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the…

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

In addition to the other replies, I've see cases where the city only approves construction on the condition that some of the land is allocated to city use. That means if the edges are developed first, it's possible for the city to get the room to expand infrastructure.

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

#905

Post by majormajor »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #878
rwcarlsen wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.

> And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY. I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness? Really I think the state ought to be setting complete menus that th…

> I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness?

It's less that it's any more straightforward in NY or CA, it's just that zoning and NIMBYism regulation is not the sole domain of either American political party. You can't escape it by moving to a red state.

The usual canard is something like "California won't build more dense housing, so I'm moving to Texas," but housing is even less dense in Texas, so lower costs are not caused by less regulation around housing density! It's just that the ratio of supply to demand isn't as out of whack yet, as metro area populations have been lower and the cities themselves less landlocked, so building out has been easier and cheaper.

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

#906

Post by nickthemagicman »

digitaltrees wrote: post #54
nickthemagicman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you can't afford to pay the GOVERNMENT any more because property taxes have skyrocketed out of control I'm sure a private company will be happy to swoop in and buy your house out from under you.

So you’d rather have an inefficient use of property that sits languishing just because some one owned it in the past? One of the benefits of taxing property is that it encourages productive use. Use it or lose it. The increasing velocity of property transfers helps increase economic activity.

Yes. I'm happy with inefficient use of our water supplies as well as our housing supply.

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

#907

Post by ta1234567890 »

nradov wrote: post #797
ta1234567890 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Blaming real estate agents is just silly. They're salespeople so of course they're going to try to maximize commissions. Ultimately it's up to the buyer to agree on the price or walk away. Listing prices are almost totally meaningless. At most they're just a starting point for initial negotiations.

> Listing prices are almost totally meaningless. At most they're just a starting point for initial negotiations.

Not sure if you have no experience in real state at all, or just want to play devil’s advocate.

The listing price can have a huge effect. Like I described before, if the listing price is lower than the perceived value of the listing, it makes it attractive to a wider audience, because people that wouldn’t be able to afford the property at the “real” price will think they can now afford it, thus there will be a lot more offers and that gives the realtors (and seller) very good leverage. This happened to me personally, on “the first round” the seller got 40 offers, so the agent used that to pump up the price and make it look like there was a lot of interest (surely there was, but for an unrealistically low price). There were only 3 offers on the “second round”. After 3-4 rounds, the property ended up going for 20%+ over asking and the buyer had to waive all contingencies. Without the artificially low listing price, they would have probably gotten one or two offers at the most and most likely would have not been able to get the buyer to waive contingencies.

Conversely, if the listing price is too high, the property might take a long time to sell, and lowering the price signals that the seller is either in a hurry or that there’s an issue with the property, either way the seller loses a lot of negotiating power.

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

#908

Post by RHSeeger »

fomine3 wrote: post #876
RHSeeger wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

Japan sometimes don't care much about such issues caused by building large apartment, like extremely crowded station/train and lack of nursery school. I don't know it's good thing, but these are often complained.

You can't just ignore things insufficient sewers or water. And insufficient roads isn't much better.

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

#909

Post by RHSeeger »

khrbrt wrote: post #863
RHSeeger wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

Density brings in more tax revenue to pay for expanding the sewers and can support more mass transit to reduce traffic -- no street widening needed. In many cities, it's the poorer denser neighborhoods that subsidize the more affluent less dense neighborhoods. Scroll down to red and green map here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/10/lafayette

You can really add things like sewers after the fact. You either need to add them before or during the addition of more (higher density) housing. Generally, this means that the builder of the new housing is required to foot the bill for that added capacity, which can make it not worth the cost.

The same tends to be true of roads, but with less catastrophic results. In a town where going 2 miles can take 20 minutes, adding a lot more housing without adding road capacity is not a great plan.

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

#910

Post by eric-hu »

babyshake wrote: post #847
RHSeeger wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

What about throwing as much money as it takes to not only build new towns with dense housing in places where those towns don't already exist, but to make those new places to live much more desirable than a pre-planned new development normally would be? I imagine the political will isn't there. The answer to me would be an ultimatum. Either yes in your backyard, or a tax is levied for a new development that won't be t…

This sounds like the original motivation of some ghost towns in China.
Post reply on HN