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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

#521

Post by giantg2 »

cycomanic wrote: post #441
giantg2 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and pricing out existing residents in low density housing by taxing them to oblivion.

I never understood this argument. People are not priced out of their homes. Their homes are rising in prices so they actually have assets to match the price increase. Yes they might not be able to afford the tax, but they have a million dollar asset that they could use. The whole point of the tax is to disencent a single person living in a huge house all by themselves.

The argument is that you shouldn't be forcing people out of their homes. The reason you don't get the argument is that you view people's property as something you should optimize for others, while the people making the argument are believers in strong property rights, especially that they want to be left alone without oppressive government actions. The other half of the argument is that your terms are vague. Not every million dollar house is huge. It could be used to price people out of normal SFH just because the land is zoned in a way that allows higher density housing.

You're literally proposing a scheme that views removing people from their homes as beneficial. Your values don't match with others. That's the disconnect.

And by the way, that increase in value over the years is because other people want to live in that area. Perhaps we should disincentivize that instead of punishing the people who made it a nice area to live in.

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

#522

Post by candiodari »

slg wrote: post #440
davidw wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal should probably be something close to price stability . If prices bounce all around, up and down, people pay more attention than if they were just kind of 'there', and you could buy or sell whenever the need arose in order to move into housing that better suits you at a given point in your life.

Exactly. True stability is likely unattainable, but I would love if it was a governmental goal like a steady small positive rate of inflation is a goal. There will be temporary changes like the last year with inflation. But for the prior 30 years there has been a very steady roughly 2-4% rate of inflation. Could you imagine if the federal, state, and local government fully committed to steadying housing costs? It wou…

The government goal already is 2% inflation per year. That’s why this is happening ...

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

#523

Post by NotYourLawyer »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #308
carom wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is huge value in subdividing land and building, creating housing for people who cannot afford to buy and build. You're stuck in a suburbia mindset. Not everyone can afford a SFH, there isn't enough land. Not everyone can afford to build. Not everyone wants to have massive switching costs when they need to move.

I think most people who are against the rentier economy would agree that there is great value in all of those things, but that they shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise. One way to obtain that value without landlords is for the state to buy land, subdivide it, and build dense housing units available to citizens who live in them at a reasonable, or even subsidized, cost.

No post body was provided.

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

#524

Post by giantg2 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #501
boringg wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole argument is how to make housing more affordable to live in. Your argument is ... pay more for land tax to avoid speculation however if you live somewhere in order to pay for it you need to consistently be more productive than the speculators (who would just charge the land tax to the renters anyways). Which doesn't solve the problem in any way shape or form.

It does because taxes don't disappear. Say we tax land at 4% and the value of all the land in the US is 100k per person. That means the average person pays an extra 4k and each person receives a $4,000 check. If you own an average amount of land you aren't any worse off.

But what is considered average can change. This is especially true since the land value is not uniform like your hypothetical example. Any system like this can be manipulated for one group to use against a minority group.

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

#525

Post by toomuchtodo »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #474
toomuchtodo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taxes and debt, while on the surface appearing to be similar obligations, have drastically different recourse options and enforcement mechanisms. Debt creates money, and if you subscribe to modern monetary theory, taxes destroy money.

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

#526

Post by NotYourLawyer »

ddevault wrote: post #275
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only people who have good enough credit for a mortgage and can afford to buy deserve a place to live Sounds worse when you put it that way though.

There are more than two options.

No post body was provided.

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

#527

Post by chrismarlow9 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #167

I will be perfectly ok if the high interest rates drive these companies bankrupt. They chose to speculate. Speculation comes with risk. Let them bear the burden. For owner occupancy protections, the real answer was to never to give tax breaks to investors in the first place. Only owner occupants should have any tax breaks. But this is not going to happen. So let the speculators burn and go bankrupt.

They won't. They will get a bailout because they have intentionally woven themselves into the fabric of everything so that it's mutually assured destruction if they go under.

If they go bankrupt it will wipe out 401k, retirement plans, and cause massive layoffs due to businesses going under as their primary sources of funding (debt) dry up. They already did it in 2008 and called the governments bluff. Now that they know they can do it there's no way they're turning back.

Edit: bringing back the glass steagall act would be a good start. But it will take decades to unwind the standoff.

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

#528

Post by candiodari »

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…

Weird ... if you look at statistics investors are not “the rich”, they’re pensioners and people saving up for pensions. This is done by proxy, through state-run pension funds.

Yes there’s a few rich in there and it’s not like they’re egalitarian, but it isn’t Jeff Bezos either.

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

#529

Post by gbronner »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #481
missedthecue wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resale value is probably one of the number one things car buyers look at when shopping.

Look at what people actually do, not what they say for cheap virtue points online. Reliability is way, way down the wish-list. People don't really consider it until all the other key features they want are very solidly satisfied. And even then the take rate is maybe 50%. For every jerk in a 4Runner or Pilot there's an equal and opposite jerk in a Landrover or Tiguan.

Cars, especially in the first few years, are extremely reliable. So a less reliable new car is still amazing when compared to a 15 year old beater.
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