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

Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 634 posts

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#101

Post by dvtrn »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #86
harryh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades of under-building due to restrictive zoning laws will do that.

Do you have numbers to back that up? If anything, underbuilding came from a moribund housing market after 2008, as many left the industry and it took way too long to ramp up on talent when housing began to boom again (a lack of people skilled in building houses is still a problem). But I doubt this is an under building problem at all. Look at Seattle and the area, and there isn’t a shortage of new housing projects at…

Do you have numbers to back that up?

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-823.pd...

I found the section "New Evidence on the Effects of Land-Use Regulation" to be quite interesting in past reads (and discussions) and probably relevant.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#102

Post by edw519 »

cletus wrote: post #15

This is a good example of the fallacy of youth: buying too far into hype and being all "the sky is falling" with negative news. It wasn't long ago that we were reading how Zillow et al were going to buy up all the housing stock and keep millenials and Zoomers homeless forever. The people saying this have obviously never gone through a "bust" cycle. This is unsurprising as we've now been in the longest bull market in…

I'd love to know who signed off on this idea. They need to be fired.

True for everywhere I've ever worked.

Imagine how much better everything would be if we prioritized this problem before all the tech orgasms.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#103

Post by foogazi »

rel2thr wrote: post #91

very tough to build a model like this to purchase homes cause you hit a really rough adverse selection problem even if your model is 99% great , the 1% that you overvalue are going to be the sellers that come to you and agree to sell you their homes because your offer is too good to be true

That’s the paradox of home buying / or any other bidding mechanism - did you get a good price ?

No one else was willing to offer a better deal to the seller

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#104

Post by short12 »

cletus wrote: post #15

This is a good example of the fallacy of youth: buying too far into hype and being all "the sky is falling" with negative news. It wasn't long ago that we were reading how Zillow et al were going to buy up all the housing stock and keep millenials and Zoomers homeless forever. The people saying this have obviously never gone through a "bust" cycle. This is unsurprising as we've now been in the longest bull market in…

Correction, Zillow core business is crappy advertising

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#105

Post by kadomony »

webinvest wrote: post #42
jdavis703 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$400k seems very affordable. I could easily buy a house today if that’s what FHA-grade (i.e. something more than a burned out shack) housing went for. In my county the median house goes for over $1 million.

What country is that?

He said "county", not country.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#106

Post by jackorange »

whimsicalism wrote: post #32
cletus wrote: post #15

This is a good example of the fallacy of youth: buying too far into hype and being all "the sky is falling" with negative news. It wasn't long ago that we were reading how Zillow et al were going to buy up all the housing stock and keep millenials and Zoomers homeless forever. The people saying this have obviously never gone through a "bust" cycle. This is unsurprising as we've now been in the longest bull market in…

Sorry, youth here. The housing market remains screwed regardless of the actions of Zillow or Blackstone or whomever.

I think this is a fallacy perpetuated by unrealistic ideals. I bought a house for 175K at 24. I only make 50K a year. I don't have a college degree.

Lot of people saying buying houses is hard, unrealistic, or impractical want to buy mansions with a 10 second commute to their workplace in silicon valley but the reality is most people are not living like that.

Wage workers are still buying houses no problem in what are considered "low income" areas as they have been and interest rates are better than ever.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#107

Post by sokoloff »

secondaryacct wrote: post #85
drnonsense42 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree strongly with this sentiment. Clearly Zillow is not going to buy all the houses in America and turn us into serfs overnight - that is an absurd strawman. What? Zillow is far from the only actor here trying to enter this space. It's quite ridiculous to claim, as you are, that industrial-scale home speculation is doomed to fail since there are boom and bust cycles and therefore we don't need to worry. That's…

Let them buy overpriced useless houses, if they buy too many we'll vote them out or we'll take the homes back by force. Everything is a balance and the only way to make money long term is to be undeniably useful to a majority of people. Anything below that bar will die down in shame, infamy or violence.

What does “vote them out” mean in this context?

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#108

Post by bchris4 »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #60
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #24

How on earth did a real estate analytics company lose money buying and selling homes in THIS market?

Predicting the future is really hard

Particularly if your time horizon is like 3 months. Seems like they’re making two huge mistakes now by selling. Home values will almost certainly rise from here over the next 10+ years, and even the most casual market watcher/Zillow user knows that their “zestimates” are crap, they weren’t going to nail it that precisely. Literally everyone intuitively knows that it was a bad time to buy and now an even worse time to sell… except for the analytics company with all of the data. They should just hold and rent the properties via their app, if they can’t make the math work otherwise.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#109

Post by ineedasername »

Loughla wrote: post #64
barbazoo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But will they stay low for the next 30 years? Probably not. It's not a good idea to justify ones house buying decision with an all time low interest rate.

In the US, fixed interest mortgage rates are sort of the standard. So, the decision to buy now based on interest rates is a keen driver of many buyers. Source; I've refinanced three times based on rates going down. I dropped 10 years and 200/mo. off of my mortgage for the low, low price of $750 worth of appraisals.

I dropped 10 years and 200/mo. off of my mortgage

Roughly the same here, and I had a very low mortgage from a small line of credit.

Between sticker price on a house and interest rates, prices tend to equalize-- people can always only afford $X/month, regardless of the proportion going to interest. This means that, all else being equal. the most fortunate time to buy is when slightly higher % rates have kept sticker prices down a bit. That way when rates inevitably go down at some point in the future you can refi at a lower rate, getting the benefit of having purchased a lower price and then dropping down to a lower interest rate as well. Certainly not something you can choose to do, given that trends often measure by a decade or two, so this is just an observation, not advice to wait for higher interest rates to suppress sticker prices.

Post reply on HN