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Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

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Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#251

Post by dogma1138 »

iso1210 wrote: post #217
dogma1138 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median price for a property in London is £600K, the average is over £1M today. That means that normal people cannot afford to buy anything in London even with HTB which is a terrible policy the people who can afford to use it are already in the top percentiles. A £600K property as a first time buyer requires you to have about £100K to get on a property ladder. 10% deposit for a 90% LTV mortgage is £60K, stamp dut…

> even with HTB which is a terrible policy the people who can afford to buy are already in the top percentiles What a load of rubbish. HTB really helped us when buying by giving 5 years of interest free We bought a 240k house with a 12k deposit and 48k htb. Moving costs etc meant we had to find about £17k, which we borrowed. Assuming you do that now, HTB means paying £647 a month on the mortgage and £330 a month on r…

HTB is a disastrous policy that did nothing but to increase the prices of properties.

People could borrow much more than they could because the government covered 40% in London and 20% outside of it.

Look at the new developments in London, the price is well just under the HTB limit for the handful of HTB flats, then there is the shared ownership racket too.

And commuting towns aren’t that cheaper either, and that is even before you account for the insane costs of rail passes.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#252

Post by mytailorisrich »

iso1210 wrote: post #217
dogma1138 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median price for a property in London is £600K, the average is over £1M today. That means that normal people cannot afford to buy anything in London even with HTB which is a terrible policy the people who can afford to use it are already in the top percentiles. A £600K property as a first time buyer requires you to have about £100K to get on a property ladder. 10% deposit for a 90% LTV mortgage is £60K, stamp dut…

> even with HTB which is a terrible policy the people who can afford to buy are already in the top percentiles What a load of rubbish. HTB really helped us when buying by giving 5 years of interest free We bought a 240k house with a 12k deposit and 48k htb. Moving costs etc meant we had to find about £17k, which we borrowed. Assuming you do that now, HTB means paying £647 a month on the mortgage and £330 a month on r…

The problem with HTB is that it sustains inflation. Essentially it subsidises continued property prices' growth, which, in my view, is rather nonsensical economically.

As for saving for a deposit, I think an issue is also that many people seem not to have been educated about the benefits of saving at all. Bluntly, many young people I see find the money for short term consumption and don't save anything.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#253

Post by chrisseaton »

jlokier wrote: post #132
kortilla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you buy a house then? Does the government just own all housing?

You just buy a house the usual ways and live in it. With cash or a mortgage. If you live in it, it's not called "property investing". "Property investing" refers to buying property to benefit from price speculation and use as a store of value, without actually using the property as a home. The property may sit there empty most or all of the time, or it may be rented out, with a combination of rent and price speculati…

Since houses don’t wear out or get used up, like clothes or food, and you can sell them when you’re done with them, they’re inherently an investment.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#254

Post by iso1210 »

itsdsmurrell wrote: post #160
iso1210 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not a lot to be fair, and interest rates are below inflation.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#256

Post by cutler »

johndoe0815 wrote: post #38
Isinlor wrote: post #7

Do I understand correctly that they want to kick out all the students from the cities? When I was studying in Groningen I had to look for places to rent out of the city. Some students were camping in tents in front of the campus. Here is a photo from another city, Tilburg: https://www.dutchnews.nl/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/st... Some academic staff were even taking them in due to shortage of places to rent. I…

The trend here in Trondheim (third-largest city in Norway with 200k residents, of these ca. 40k are students) is that a lot of houses and apartments are explicitly offered for sale with plans for conversion to student apartments. Rents in the city have increased by 8.2% over the last 12 months, property prices by 20-25% over the last two years. The price per square meter to buy anything reasonable is above 6k Eur now…

Even better - ban profit on property sales.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#257

Post by throw0101a »

saddlerustle wrote: post #116
dmje wrote: post #25

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…

Your first point is a misleading anecdote given there's actually data on this. The amount of empty homes in London is at a historical low [1]. Broadly, cities with the highest amount of empty homes tend to have the most affordable housing, because obviously that indicates there's more than enough housing to go round. [1] https://i.imgur.com/jX1OpmS.png

Contra:

> The Square Mile has the highest percentage of empty homes in the entire country, fresh data states.

> Some 42.4 properties per 1,000 sit unused in the City of London, leaving it top of the charts and the only London authority to feature in the nationwide top 10.

> Data compiled by insurer Admiral also shows that as many as 29,242 London homes have been unoccupied for at least six months, to a collective value of roughly £15 billion.

* https://www.citymatters.london/vacant-homes-city-london/

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#258

Post by II2II »

cutler wrote: post #230
II2II wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, the size and type of investor seem to be a factor. I have rented my entire adult life since it has some advantages (notably mobility), yet have always rented from homeowners or small-time investors. They tend to place more emphasis upon keeping their units rented and keeping good renters. Except for moving, I have only seen my rent increase once. It was a small increase and I lived in that place f…

Market investment, ie. where little new value is added, is gambling dressed up to look respectable. It's all about getting something for nothing which is the root cause of all our economic ills.

I try to be careful with how I think about these things, so I don't go off the deep end. In my mind, investment is the adding of value while trading does not add value. Both are gambling on the outcome, but investment tries to direct the outcome while trading tries to predict the outcome.

In the context of housing, investment may look like a renovation to improve desirability or replacing a small number of units with a larger number of units. In contrast, trading would involve maintaining the status quo in hopes that the desirability of a neighbourhood or relative scarcity would increase the value of a property.

That being said, I don't know how you would create a system of investment that doesn't create an environment for speculative trading. In would be difficult to encourage the former without a means of selling off the investment at a later date. Reducing the frequency of trading wouldn't help in the case of housing since those are long term investments to start with.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#259

Post by chrisseaton »

spockz wrote: post #242
ForHackernews wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a self-correcting problem, isn't it? Either those cafes and shops will raise prices and pay their staff more, or they'll close down. I've never understood why we're supposed to feel bad for "small business owners" who won't find staff when paying peanuts for their crappy jobs.

The point is that before there existed an ecosystem. That “peanuts” is what the business owner was able to afford to pay which was enough for the employees to make a somewhat decent living. Now that isn’t possible anymore. The objection is to the change/disruption of a local ecosystem by outsiders.

Blaming outsiders - classic strategy, can’t go wrong!

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#260

Post by taffer »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #177
pydry wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably encourage less urban sprawl by driving more efficient use of city center land and housing.

It depends. If owned land is converted for rent then the LVT is passed on to the tenant. To avoid paying the LVT tenants are incentivized to own, which may imply buying new construction. As population density increases, desirability increases, and people may try investing with the goal of renting, which with an LVT will more sharply decrease the desirability of population density.

> To avoid paying the LVT tenants are incentivized to own

LVT is paid by the owner of the land. That is the whole point of a LVT, that you cannot avoid it.

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