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Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

nltimes.nl

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

#581

Post by arwineap »

Spooky23 wrote: post #439
imtringued wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low interest rates have made everything cheap but the supply of housing (specifically land) is extremely inflexible. You can make more cars but not land. The location value of your house skyrockets at the expense of everyone else. However, make no mistake. The problem isn't money. Even if you buy your house with Bitcoin you will run into the same problem. The problem is that location is a a monopoly. You can tax it o…

I’m not making any mistake, cheap money is absolutely the biggest problem that we have today. My former mentor bought a house on Nantucket for $150k in 1990, sold for $3.5M earlier this year. That appreciation isn’t due to inflation or the constrained supply of homes — it’s always been constrained. It’s due to increased demand fueled by excess capital. There’s no money in traditional banking. Even with negligible int…

Not a 19th century scholar; can you provide a couple links to the current situation?

Or reference the points you are trying to make to make it easier to search? For instance, most of my results right now are pertaining to the civil war economies of the north / south United States

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

#582

Post by mcv »

logicchains wrote: post #430
mcv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We've got laws to mitigate or redirect any harmful innate traits that we've got. Greed, like violence, is definitely among them.

>Exactly. We've got laws to mitigate or redirect any harmful innate traits that we've got. Greed, like violence, is definitely among them. And what about envy? That's clearly a big problem among commenters in this thread.

I didn't claim it was an exhaustive list. I suppose you could include all of the classic "mortal sins", though I don't see the others as having quite as devastating social impact as greed and violence. Maybe envy or pride might relate to society's obsession with social media and celebrity worship? I don't think those are quite as easy to legislate without infringing on personal freedom of expression, though.

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

#583

Post by mcv »

birbs wrote: post #65
mcv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an issue of inflation. Inflation has been super low for the past decade or more. Everything else is cheap, it's just housing that's expensive. It's a combination of scarcity and speculation leading to more artificial scarcity. Make it less attractive for speculators and build more houses.

Inflation is extremely high: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/

Looks like inflation has spiked in the last few months in the US, but that's after a long period of fairly low inflation. Compared to the past century, it's not that extreme yet; the 1970s and 1980s had higher inflation[0]. And the high house prices are not something from just the past few months, so it's really not inflation that's causing it.

My personal experience is Netherland[1] where the period of low inflation still continues, and house prices have also been shooting up for quite some time. We sold our previous house for 25% more after 8 years, and our current house has increased 25% in value after only 4 years. And even before I bought my first house, I was dismayed at the ridiculous house prices and wanted to wait until the whole thing crashed. (It did crash shortly after we bought our first house in 2008, but even that barely hurt the value of our house.)

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi (click 'max' to see the full graph) [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/netherlands/inflation-cpi

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

#586

Post by gpvos »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #575
gpvos wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means testing would force medium-rich people to live on the streets (or with their parents), since there are no rental houses available between 700 and 1200 euro/month (that is, between social housing and the liberalized sector), and not all of them will be able to buy a home with the current prices.

We're talking about rich people occupying social homes intended for the poorest people. However bad it may be for 'medium-rich' people, it's much worse for poor. Any extreme outcome (like living on the streets) would have a much higher chance with poor, than medium-rich, who tend to have options. There's plenty of housing stock at 1200 a month that can be shared by two 'medium-rich' persons within a 45m commute from…

Fair enough. Though cynically speaking the people just above the social housing limit are probably a more interesting part of the electorate than the poor.

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

#587

Post by posguy »

silexia wrote: post #505
afuchs wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a dead comment later in this thread which using directed abusive language towards another commenter while linking to a Louis Rossmann video. The video [1] was interesting, although the dead comment seemed to completely ignore the video's [1] main point, where Louis talks about a hypothesis [2] where in New York City there may be an incentive structure between real estate investors and banks which is creating…

I am not a housing investor, but I see many misguided articles claiming housing investors are driving prices up. The factors that primarily control pricing in the housing market are supply and demand. In Seattle, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere demand has risen steadily but supply has not. This causes prices to increase sharply. The solution is to increase the housing supply. If the government removes regulations p…

Two of the homes on my block here in an inner Seattle suburb are owned by Chinese investors and have never been lived in or rented.

The owner of one property owns 8 other newly built homes within the city. The 2nd property is owned by a person that has 14 other properties listing them as the registered owner.

I miss the people that lived in the homes that were razed to make way for these million dollar blights on the neighborhood.

These vampire homes just accrue damage (whether the glass garage door panes start shattering, or the siding starts going, or the owner decides the landscaping should be ripped out and redone again for god knows what reason?) followed by the sons or cousins of the property owners dealing with it a few weeks later.

No value is gained by these vagrant properties existing. Less people live in my neighborhood due to it, housing is harder to find, the city and county have less reason to invest in making local transit infrastructure better.

We need to tax vagrant properties. USPS has the data on which units are not collecting their mail on a daily basis, SPU/City Light knows who is not putting their trash out or using any power or water, and voter registration records are public. We could easily start assessing a 3 cent per square foot daily vagrancy tax until residency is established at the formerly vagrant address.

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

#588

Post by Spooky23 »

arwineap wrote: post #581
Spooky23 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not making any mistake, cheap money is absolutely the biggest problem that we have today. My former mentor bought a house on Nantucket for $150k in 1990, sold for $3.5M earlier this year. That appreciation isn’t due to inflation or the constrained supply of homes — it’s always been constrained. It’s due to increased demand fueled by excess capital. There’s no money in traditional banking. Even with negligible int…

Not a 19th century scholar; can you provide a couple links to the current situation? Or reference the points you are trying to make to make it easier to search? For instance, most of my results right now are pertaining to the civil war economies of the north / south United States

Sure, I’d start here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

I think the the internet and technology is the equivalent to the railroads and industrialization in the 19th century. You also have the currency issues with silver and gold standards which may play out similarly to some of the crypto issues of today.

I’ve worked in a large enterprise for a long time, going from project to project that essentially automated away some semi-professional human work with automation at a 50-90% savings. Over 15 years, there’s about 35% fewer people doing 50% more work.

That trend is only speeding up. I don’t see how the current model of using cheap money to prop up real estate is a sustainable economic model.

Take with appropriate grain of salt. I’m not an economist, and my understanding is that of a layman.

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

#589

Post by dogma1138 »

iso1210 wrote: post #551
lurgburg wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It let me buy a property which I wouldn't be able to without HTB Possibly you're taking the wrong counterfactual here? "If I hadn't HTB but everyone else did" vs "If no-one had HTB". It's possible you're quite right about the first, but it tells us little about the second. Possibly in the presence of HTB, prices just rise again until they reach their equilibrium of just-barely-affordable.

House price doesn't matter, it's the deposit. HTB may have pushed up the house price by say 30%, but it meant the deposit was lower (12k rather than 18k) and the repayments were lower for the first 5 years.

The deposit doesn’t matter, what matters is the total loan amount.

For a £500K flat you need a £50K deposit but you also need a household income of £100K or more to be able to borrow £450K as banks cap the maximum amount they’ll loans at 4-4.5 of your annual income.

So HTB didn’t only increase the prices it also pushed people to take on loans that they normally would not be able to afford.

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

#590

Post by dogma1138 »

iso1210 wrote: post #521
dogma1138 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> HTB is a disastrous policy that did nothing but to increase the prices of properties. It let me buy a property which I wouldn't be able to without HTB, therefore your statement is objectively wrong. > And commuting towns aren’t that cheaper either Plenty of 2 bed houses in daily commuting distance for £250k - easily affordable on a London wage.

For 250K you’ll find shitty property that would require a 2-3 hours of daily commute that will cost around £5000 annually per person working in London…
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