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

How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

fullstackeconomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 684 posts

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#601

Post by sobkas »

bawolff wrote: post #576
sobkas wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party. > There isn't any reason for it to be adversarial, it's certainly not inherently so. Only if one or both sides want to make it adversarial. Landlords compete with their potential tenants for houses to buy. When landlord driven price increase, it prices out people from buying a home/flat, but they…

So you're saying that in a capitalistic society, people with capital do better? Colour me shocked. The landlord also takes on risk and responsibility here. Like any business, if they do a shitty job they go broke. If they do a good job, they make bank and expand their business.

They will go broke if they do bad job at extracting money from their renters, not bad job at providing value to them. Also: https://www.wsj.com/articles/landlords-were-never-meant-to-g... , privatization of profits and socializing losses.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#602

Post by camgunz »

bliteben wrote: post #593
BucketsMcG wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm concerned the quality-of-life tradeoff heavily favours higher-density housing. I live in an apartment block and so does everybody else for miles around. Our building, like almost every other around here, tops out at seven storeys. It's very solidly constructed, so there's little to no noise from neighbours, not that they make much noise to begin with as they're a pretty considerate bunch. The downside t…

You might as well live in the matrix, you seem to live in an artificial world with no connection to nature. I myself desire to live on the edge of "civilization" as much as I can, I know this presents a conundrum in that I'm creating a market for destroying it, but this is a human condition as old as time.

Isn't this most people in rich countries? The line's pretty fuzzy, but in most rich countries you're disconnected from nature unless your job is in nature (ranger, landscaper, farmer, ag researcher) or homeless.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#603

Post by ohgodplsno »

qeternity wrote: post #566
ohgodplsno wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People not being able to own homes is not "healthy". Having to pay 50% of your salary to landlords is not "healthy". It is concentration of wealth, it is the very definition of precarity. Unless your hope is to see a collapse of societies, things go really bad when people can't afford fundamental needs.

You replied without understanding my comment. Let me pose the question back to you: if everyone can comfortably afford food, housing and basic necessities, what is going to cause population growth to level off? Your characterization of bad things happening is exactly my point - you’re just failing to understand that I’m saying that’s the healthy part.

As the other response to you shows, you're the one missing the point. Population growth massively slows down the more your basic needs are met. Countries that have high children counts are countries where the solution to actually reaching wealth is multiplying until few of them die, or one of them ends up making a lot of money (relative to the country they live in).

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#604

Post by runamok »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #9

The scary thing is that it's easy to see how something how like this could drive a market boom and bust cycle. I'm imagining a scenario where two iBuyer companies try to outbid each other algorithmically, driving the prices further and further out of reach of people who are looking for a primary home. Tangentially related, I talked to a friend who works on geospatial data for one of the big vacation rental companies,…

Cities can regulate this. Recent example in San Diego: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/politics/san-diego-mayor-si...

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#605

Post by lelanthran »

scruple wrote: post #113
paxys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Heck I know several people who prefer to keep their condos/houses empty rather than rent them out at market rate because of 100% tenant friendly city and state laws. Someone can move in and refuse to pay rent, refuse to leave, use your house as a drug den, destroy your property and lots more, and you can do nothing about it. At that point the city is just incentivizing homeowners to contribute to the housing…

A home 2 doors down from myself had been empty since the neighborhood was built in 2016 until 2020 when rental prices in our neighborhood blew through the ceiling. I always assumed their financial calculus was such that the appreciation alone, on an empty home, was a better prospect to them than what they could've gotten in rent in those earlier years (weighted against upkeep/maintenance vs. leaving the place empty a…

> I'm unsurprised to hear that it's commonplace. It's just... upsetting.

Law of unintended consequences.

Make it almost so expensive to evict that an eviction can wipe away years of profit, and landlords will rather have the place empty while it appreciates.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#606

Post by pj_mukh »

bliteben wrote: post #596
pj_mukh wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land is a finite resource but housing units are not. Once America gets over it’s love affair with single family homes, we could undercut most speculators by just building up.

Why can't the US just have less people with a higher standard of living? Why is "progress" always more. Why do we have to make everything worse by shifting the baseline ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline ).

Because a higher standard of living requires more people to come up with the said standard of living (see: history, the shifting of innovation centers to population centers)

The degrowth movements garden variety neo-pastoralist misanthropy makes it blind to the fact that more humans (given a good system of governance and rules) is actually an amazing thing.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#607

Post by bawolff »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #592
bawolff wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that in a capitalistic society, people with capital do better? Colour me shocked. The landlord also takes on risk and responsibility here. Like any business, if they do a shitty job they go broke. If they do a good job, they make bank and expand their business.

No because you can't really decline to have a home if none of the options are good for you. If there are only shitty landlords then you'll be forced to choose a shitty landlord.

I can't decline to eat. Food still costs money.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#608

Post by bastawhiz »

moonchrome wrote: post #563
bastawhiz wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house I bought was listed for two weeks. They had one day of showings. The following day they stopped accepting offers. Maybe it's different in the Bay, but here in Raleigh houses are available to tour for essentially eight hours.

The alternative being to ask above market the house so it sits on the market for longer ? I don't understand what Zillow changes in this story ? (I'm genuinely curious - not from US)

Zillow eliminates the notion of showings as an event. They plug in a smart lock and (at least to my understanding) you can tour the minute the listing goes up. There's no rushing to showings, your can tour any house that's in their portfolio on the market.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#609

Post by screenbreakout »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #588
screenbreakout wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a way if the rental prices were to stay reasonable (say it was a non profit running the schtick) isn't a great way for as many people as possible to share a limited ressource? Maybe property is like golden handcuffs, nice but locks you down...again it's more a western thing as we in the east tend to buy cash down... Though I would like to see some company buying out the inner city ground floor space of some of…

> But in a way if the rental prices were to stay reasonable There's zero evidence to believe that this will be the case. I will never trust large multi-family property management companies driven by software to consider keeping rental rates reasonable. That's antithetical to our capitalist system, profit is the one and only goal. > Maybe property is like golden handcuffs, nice but locks you down... In terms of utiliz…

"There's zero evidence to believe that this will be the case" Well I guess it depends on the regulatory framework, imo it's the constructor lobbies pushing such a narrative... in more developed societies where cheap labour isn't so available rental has become the norm...of course one could also argue that high real estate prices mean the rich and unscrupulous can hide and flip huge amounts of ill earnt gains... but it doesn't have to be so... Are there housing cooperatives in the US?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#610

Post by pj_mukh »

darkerside wrote: post #575
zamfi wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That condo prices are staying flat is fantastic news. Now we just need to build condos that are appropriate for all stages of life -- not just young singlehood and coupledom. Building up will not solve the "not enough SFH/townhomes" problem, but it will fix the homeownership problem. And it may help with the former, if there are enough current SFH/townhome owners who would prefer a really nice condo close to work/dow…

> Now we just need to build condos that are appropriate for all stages of life -- not just young singlehood and coupledom. Can you share some ideas about what this would look like?

I like what culdesac is trying: https://culdesac.com/

If we could only scale and therefore make this cheaper.

Post reply on HN