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Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

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Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#471

Post by TuringNYC »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #216
renewiltord wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL that is total bullshit. In SF, they oppose high-density high-income housing too. It's total motte and bailey shit. Here's the real algorithm: if density == low: return "This won't solve the problem" if income == low: return "This ruins the neighbourhood character" if density == mid and income == high: return "This is gentrification and soulless coffee shops!" if density == high and income == high: return "This is…

This pretty much nails it. The way I saw it put which feels fitting is, “Everybody who moves into San Francisco wants to be the last person to move into San Francisco”. Of course this isn’t a practical desire in any city, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to make it happen anyway.

>> “Everybody who moves into San Francisco wants to be the last person to move into San Francisco”.

Person moves to SF and puts down life savings as down-payment on 1:4 leveraged home...not a surprise they want to ensure they arent wiped out. A 20% decrease in value wipes out the life savings. The whole system is designed to perpetuate itsself.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#472

Post by BurningFrog »

Cause and effect are often hard to disentangle.

In this case I'm convinced that constantly rising housing values is the reason investors buy up housing, not the other way around.

Surely it makes sense that investors buy assets that continue to appreciate more than other investment types?

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#473

Post by buscoquadnary »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #154

"but many Republican lawmakers oppose such controls." — I'm not American and not in in the US, so I'm wondering, why in many articles I read, "Doing Good Things For People™" tend to be opposed by Republicans? 1. Are there a scheme to vilify them? Bcoz it's not even mentioned why they oppose (maybe they see Bad Things™ far ahead). 2. Are they not elected by the people?

Because many spend so much time moral grandstanding and signaling their virtue they cannot conceive of anyone with a contrary opinion to them having any valid reason for disagreeing, and therefore the only reason for them doing what they are doing must be because they are morally deficient and evil.

This then gets reinforced by a media-industrial complex that is happy to continue to feed you points you agree with to get you to keep clicking.

Disclaimer: I am not saying I support the Republican party or that I agree with them, but that doesn't change that tons of people cannot possibly conceive of someone having a different viewpoint than them being anything other than morally deficient.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#474

Post by ThunderSizzle »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #102
sudden_dystopia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that we are already running trillions of dollars in deficit for the programs we already have in place? The first step, should be to lower the deficit and actually fund the programs we have in place. We cannot just keep printing money without worsening the deficit and worsening the inflation. Yes, consumer sentiment is all hopes and dreams, but monetary policy is not. There are real world implications.

We’re going to inflate that debt away, like all developed nations with a declining fertility rate will do (Japan leads the way for us). Extend and pretend. Again, it’s not real! It’s just numbers in a database. For those concerned about sovereign debt, that should’ve been thought about before running it up on unnecessary conflicts (which there have been many!) and other unproductive efforts (tax cuts for the wealthy)…

If debt doesn't matter, then why do any of us pay any tax? We can just replace all taxes with more debt.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#476

Post by notch656a »

mikestew wrote: post #325
alexb_ wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what I've seen is people worried about "low quality tenants" (read: people who don't look just like me)

The two tenants within a few houses of us in either direction would fit my definition (and likely that of many other folks) of "low quality tenant": don't bother picking up the beer can out of their yard, don't mow (at all ), loud-ass exhaust on their shitty cars, etc. More of an eyesore than a contribution to the local community, and causing me to realize why HOAs come about. But, yeah, it's all because they have br…

As a renter I've found the neighbors dump the beer cans, their shitty trailers, and whatever other bad habits they have in my yard because they know the landlord is off in another state and everybody who lives here for 2 years and then moves on has no rapport with the authorities so it can only hurt us if we try and do something about it. The landlord is an old man who basically does 0 maintenance to the house, so the house is slowly turning into a pile of garbage that an unmown lawn actually look more fitting with.

If you want to know why we don't bother, it's because the owners of the surrounding houses use our place as dumping grounds and the owners have been there for decades and know all the housing inspectors and police. It seems pointless to even bother when the landlord wants the house to fall into disrepair and the neighbors will use their connections to authorities to dump on our grounds again as soon as we clean it up. On one occasion I was sent a notice that I would be imprisoned because of trash my neighbor put somewhere not even on our property and before I even moved in. I dutifully cleaned it up because it was clear I was going to be framed, but as that took the entire weekend I had little energy leftover afterwards to do yard work around my own place after being exhausted dealing with the neighbor owners.

Meanwhile the neighbors' house indeed did look spotless because they dumped all their trash on the renters' yards.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#477

Post by throwaway0a5e »

giantg2 wrote: post #274
slg wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Investors do not at all have the votes or weight at a local city level in most cases, especially large ones from out of town. Yes, the institutional investors aren't going to be in your local council meeting. They will be meeting with your state assembly members. They will be meeting with your Congresspeople. They won't be literal NIMBYs focusing on anyone's "backyard". However they will be working towards the same…

Likely under the guise of safety, environment, etc like building codes and conservation zoning.

>safety, environment,

It's amazing the power those subjects have to turn "YIMBY" into "regulate me harder daddy".

The cognitive dissonance required to enable this about face is a bad thing and seems to be becoming more and more prevalent and accepted in all sorts of public policy contexts.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#478

Post by larkost »

trhway wrote: post #398
slg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the investors are the symptom and not the cause. They are going where the money leads them. However a big problem with institutional investors is that they also institutionalize NIMBYism. They won't just block housing in a select neighborhood, they will block housing everywhere and they put more pressure on the federal government to ensure that housing is protected as an investment class. Both will contribute to…

>Yes, the investors are the symptom and not the cause. absolutely. If anything investors provide for liquidity of the market. The real issue is that investors, ie. the rich, are getting more and more ability to buy real estate while the middle and the low class are getting less and less capable of doing so. The reason is the huge sloshing amounts of money being given to the top, and thus those money causing a strong…

> absolutely. If anything investors provide for liquidity of the market.

No, no, no. "providing liquidity" is not a good thing unless liquidity is actually a problem almost everywhere people talk about this.

The "liquidity" provided by high-frequency traders in the stock market does not benefit anyone but themselves. For everyone else the difference between trading in minutes and hours (or even days) is near-meaningless. And they don't provide liquidity for seldom traded stocks.

And on the housing market they are not providing liquidity for the market in general. They are buying and then renting those properties out. Since they are all-cash offers they often trump "regular" buyers out of the market, even when offering the same price. Again, the only ones who benefit by this are those investors themselves.

These investors are one of the major forces pushing up the prices, the are part of the problem, not the solution.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#479

Post by jjav »

brianwawok wrote: post #294
quantified wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting is always worth 0 as equity, so it's a total loss regardless.

* It guarantees you do not lose money if the home values around you drop * It gives you a fixed monthly houseing cost. No "10k new roof" or "1k new stove" suprises hit you. * If you are say, saving 50% vs buying, you can put this difference in an index fund. This would over 10 or 20 years potentially give you a LOT of money over buying. Look, buying is mostly great. It's one of the biggest builders of wealth for most…

> It gives you a fixed monthly houseing cost.

Renting is the opposite of a fixed monthly cost, since rents go up all the time. If you rent, you can't tell me what your rent will be in ten years. I can tell you what my mortgage will be, exactly the same as today.

> No "10k new roof" or "1k new stove" suprises hit you.

If these bother you, you can sign up for house maintenance insurance programs to give you a fixed monthly cost. I'd recommend against that since they make a profit off you, you're better off putting that money into an investment account and withdraw from there when you neeed it.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#480

Post by ryukafalz »

akomtu wrote: post #463
ryukafalz wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to live somewhere and the population is growing. Where do you suggest that the kids of current residents live?

Maybe Im naive, but whats wrong with building entirely bew towns and cities? Last time I flew across the US, I saw vast wilderness with a few tiny populated places here and there.

There’s nothing broadly wrong with building entirely new cities, but it’s incredibly difficult to do for a variety of reasons. Most attempts to do this fail. Expecting new cities to absorb all of the increase in population is unrealistic.

If you’re talking new suburbs of existing cities, well, that’s basically the only expansion we’ve done in many places. Some problems with that:

- It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right now).

- If the implication is that you’re building outward because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to live in (which will happen if they don’t densify at all and the population grows), then you’re basically forcing most kids to move far away from their parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won’t want to live near their family but many do, and being able to maintain those close family ties feels important.

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