181–190 of 598 posts
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I believe the Netherlands used to allow full tax write-off of the mortgage interest (dunno if they still do). That certainly is bound to heat up the market.
This is still in place for PPOR. Does not apply for investment properties AFAIK.
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> Round here in Cornwall the jobs are things like surf instructor, supermarket worker, barperson, etc. That's not gonna stretch to the local house prices. That was the case. A colleague of mine, originally from St Just, moved to London for work as so many have to do. Another from near Cockermouth did the same. Both now work remotely full time from their 'home towns' on decent wages. Covid has done wonders for local c…
The real problem is how much the bank earns off the interest it charges you throughout your life while it had to do what?... create new money from nothing into the money supply with special permissions given to it by the government. This is why housing is so expensive to begin with. This bullshit needs to stop.
I think mortgages are pretty competitive, especially for reasonably well-paid people and there isn’t really that much profit made by the banks (your interest corresponds to inflation and the risk that you default on your loan with the house price having fallen.
Money today is worth more than money in 25 years and you have to pay the difference.
This is the only right way to deal with greed. Enough is enough.
The irony is there is such high probability with posting on this board you are part of the top 1% of the globe when it comes to wealth.
I may be biased because I moved recently to the Netherlands and looking to buy our first home and stop paying rent. But, the house prices are crazy out here. I work in tech and my wife is an academic. We earn what is definitely above market average, and it looks like we cannot afford most houses we find in the area where we are renting now(well outside Amsterdam). At this juncture, at least temporarily, investors who…
I'm a senior engineer, my wife is a neurologist, we are currently not able to afford a pretty normal house in the city.
Even if we did, buying now is a enormous waste of money. The market has been bad for years and it's absolutely out of control now.
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This is becoming a problem in farmlands too. Young farmers are unable to buy farmlands, they are forced to lease from huge landowners. It is zero risk investment for these big landowners. Farmers do all the work, put in all the investment like tools (except the land) - landowners simply collect rent. Some of these people own hundreds of thousands of acres (Bill Gates, for example). This is an ugly situation. This is…
Oh, I know! We can give them the land for free, but instead we get to collect a tax on their produce. Of course they cannot leave this arrangement without immediately paying for all the land. I think we can call these people serfs.
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Property investors are not "hoarding" houses. They buy them and then rent them out, thus increasing the supply. It is actually better for students this way: an investor that does not live in their property can rent out it whole. If a house can fit 5 people that means a living space for 5 students. If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 availabl…
> They buy them and then rent out, thus increasing the supply. That doesn't increase supply. I'm really not sure how middlemen skimming money could increase supply since that should push the supply curve to the left. > If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 available for rent. And the family moved in from somewhere else, leaving you with three…
Because that family might have moved from out of town, and students can't move to their old place that is too far from the university?
EDIT: I'm not sure that building more dorms is a good idea. My experience (although from totally different country) is that dorm rooms are the worst possible environment for learning. During my time in college there was a clear division: those who prioritized studying lived in the quiet rental apartments, those who prioritized socializing lived in the dorms :)
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We'd need to look at demand versus supply, including new builds before we can point the finger at "investors", which may be convenient but not necessarily useful. Ultimately, market forces are what they are. If demand exceeds supply then some people will always miss out. There is also the problem of the amount of liquidity available. Since 2008 and even more since Covid mountains of cash have been created at zero int…
Rents have already skyrocketed while the private residential letting sector is thriving. It's not clear at all that changing the market forces to increase access to ownership by occupiers would lead to increasing rents, even with reduced supply of rentable properties. At the moment, a lot of tenants would rather buy if they could, and are paying the same or more in rent than they would pay on an equivalent mortgage,…
Those who are already able to buy may benefit, but that's about it.
Again, a big part of the problem is also the mountain of free money in the market.
Amen to this. Two case studies from the UK I've been thinking about recently: 1) Visiting London and spending time in South Kensington - walking back to hotel at night, only about 30% of houses had any lights on. Suggestion is the others are effectively uninhabited, and a search on RightMove shows properties sell for £20-£30m for a 4/5 bed. This isn't normal Londoners, it's outside investment. 2) Cornwall, where I li…
Punitively heavy land taxes on non-primary dwellings solves this overnight. It also raises a lot of capital that can be used to provide services in the area.
In the street I live in the capital of the northern province of Fryslân (Frisia) most homes are owned by their inhabitants, but in the past few years we've seen several houses being bought by small-time investors (who already own their own home of course, are financially well on their way, and are looking for ways to save their saving from low interest rates and inflation), who charge renters four times what my fellow homeowners and I pay for mortgage.
You never get to know the renters, because they are really only here for as long as nothing better comes along (like buying a house or social housing), and who can blame them?
Meanwhile maintenance of these houses is minimal, because the market won't really reward proper upkeep at this point; they can always sell the house for an insane price tomorrow.
It's really upsetting to see my younger colleagues stuck renting a flat, while I own my house having even paid of the vast majority of the mortgage simply because I had the luck of buying it in 2013 (a major dip in the market where paying less than the listed price was common).
For the good of society we need to put a stop to this type of speculation on the housing market.