671–680 of 764 posts
I'm very curious how population decline would affect this. Part of what made housing a business was the exponential supply of new humans for hundreds of years, but that trend is changing rapidly.
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> Sellers themselves would be incentivized to make their house in good condition to sell it at a profit Many sellers don't want to do this. Consider someone who inherits their parents house, 1000 miles away. The house needs renovation. You want them to uproot their lives or find a "service provider" (1000 miles away) instead of just doing an "as is" sale to someone who will do the renovation and sell it. Sellers want…
Flippers are selling for profit so they will not sell until the market is suitable that means an incentive to artificially raise prices because as you point out flippers don't just want out unlike residents.
Many buyers aren't interested in doing a renovation, and most of the other things apply.
People who renovate for a living do have those things.
You seem to think that holding out for more money is no-cost - you're wrong.
Flippers lose money if they're wrong about the market, so why are you so insistent that it's wrong for them to make money?
Which reminds me, how long does someone have to own something for you to be okay with them selling?
Unethical? Should be disallowed period. I do strongly believe that once a propery is yours what you do with it is your concern and nobody else's. However, the business practice of purchasing properties to profit from selling it again in the future should not be allowed. So, what should happen is the government should not allow the transfer of ownership when the seller has a) multiple properties and b) is selling a pr…
You've got this wrong because you're thinking about stable states, not state transitions . 1) "Multiple" here is wrong. What is the time when you own two houses? Well, when you're moving! You buy one, then you sell the other. During that time, you own two houses. That's multiple. Study the hermit crab. 2) Your three percent cap means that property renovation, repair, expansion, and so on is completely doomed. Why did…
You want to sell your house and it has 200k valuation? A flipper will give you 200k so you can buy another house, renovate without owning it and then at sell for say 250k and the benefit to the seller would be splitting the 50k with the renovator with whatever percentage they agree on. The key difference being the flipper now has an incentive to sell soon instead of wait years until the house costs say 500k because the original seller wants his cut soon so they can move on.
Flippers will not be doomed but flipping will be less profitable than it is now unless you do it at scale of course.
For your first point is it not obvious I meant at the time you place the house on market you if you owned multiple houses?
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So it would be more ethical to take the 4 unit building I live in and make it a single family home?
If you own the building and live in one of the units the, in my opinion, most ethical course of action that still benefitted you would be to sell the remaining units to the current tenants or even better, if they've been living there long enough, treat their total rent paid as payment for the unit
Your proposal is insane. They've paid 600 dollars (rent control) a month for (let's say) 10 years. 60k buy in for a quarter of a 1.2m dollar property? I'd take that deal as a renter.
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I. Not having shelter kills. II. To not be killed is a basic human right. => Having shelter is a basic human right QED
If we are to assume that human rights are universal (the UN says so), premise two is invalid, as it is not universalizable.
For that matter I guess I would disagree with the UN. Someone who forfeits their basic human rights, for example, would not be entitled to them. So in that sense they're not universal.
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> It's counter-intuitive but the majority of housing has to be non-owner-occupied for prices to fall It seems likely the only way this happens is if the majority of real estate is owned by corporations or governments. Replace "corporations" with "wealthy nobility" and we don't need to imagine how that plays out. Historically that's never been good for workers.
Don't forget that you are living in a democracy. If the tenants can make the rules they don't have to repeat history. However, as the zoning laws show, they are short-sighted, and most likely will repeat history.
People who own nothing have little power.
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Flippers are selling for profit so they will not sell until the market is suitable that means an incentive to artificially raise prices because as you point out flippers don't just want out unlike residents.
Many sellers can't afford to do a renovation and even if they can, they don't have the knowledge to do what the market wants. (They can't borrow without both equity and the ability to repay.) They also may not have the time. Many buyers aren't interested in doing a renovation, and most of the other things apply. People who renovate for a living do have those things. You seem to think that holding out for more money i…
People can sell whenever they want, my restriction is the profit margin. I have no problem with that margin being more and more over time so long as that rate is nationally set to be uniform.
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If this is true how do investors drive up price?
The main way if you look at it is investors willing to run on empty - buying houses and then failing to rent them at the amounts they're trying to get, where they sit empty for some time before the investor goes belly up. This reduces the supply of housing in use .
I feel restrictive zoning is a much bigger issue than empty unsustainable houses.
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But the underlying point here (I think) is that people owning one home is higher priority than owning multiple homes. I’m not contradicting either of you, but it feels like you responded to a different question.
I don't disagree (favoring personal ownership over multiple ownership), but then I'm not sure how this works out. Single-family homes everywhere? It's causing housing problems due to sky rocketing prices due to low density. So I think it's accepted that we need multi-family homes, to gain higher density housing. Ultimately skyscrapers, but in most case a few units per building. In most jurisdiction, the cost of devel…
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But how would you tackle it without making the problem worse?
In Hong Kong, it's not a problem of over-densification. There's loads of unused land, but the government is incentivised to keep it empty and not zone it for high-density residential. When they do sell off a small parcel of land for new development, they auction it off leading to obscene land prices. That's what OP means about there not being an incentive for the government to lower cost of living. The high cost of l…