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US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

reuters.com

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Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#111

Post by tbrownaw »

andrewmutz wrote: post #73
mc32 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure. But I’ve been hearing of this being an issue from both progressives, leftists as well as conservatives and rightists. Maybe they’re all misinformed by their bubbles, but there seems to be some smoke…

Left-populists and right-populists like to frame issues as being a conflict between the elites and the common man. Banning big banks from owning homes is a perfect example of this. It's fine to ban big banks from buying homes and wont do damage to the nation, but don't expect it to solve the problem. High housing prices are due to zoning-based supply restrictions. These are entrenched due to politically active NIMBY…

> It's fine to ban big banks from buying homes and wont do damage to the nation

It makes things slightly worse for people who want a non-apartment house but think they might move soon.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#112

Post by chasd00 »

idk how this would work effectively. There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live. You'd have to focus on HCOL locations and make them not so high cost which seems something that should be done at the local level.

You can increase supply but investors would just snatch them up. Maybe the feds could put a cap on the value of a single-family home that an institution can own and then make ownership very tedious. For example, no institution can own a home valued at more than $500k and for each home owned a quarterly filing must be made in person at the county the home is located. I'm sure these organizations would rather own very high value homes than lots of low value ones out in BFE.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#113

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

If I were renting a house, I would much rather deal with a business than an individual landlord.

On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#114

Post by cael450 »

Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Zoning laws are the number one obstacle to building housing. They need to be regulated into oblivion. Then we need to incentivize building dense housing.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#115

Post by kelipso »

epistasis wrote: post #98
kelipso wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the argument on the other side seems like emotionally charged arguments due to TDS and not wanting to give Trump any credit. It seems obvious to most people that institutional investors should not be allowed near single family homes and you would need quite a strong argument to persuade otherwise.

Which side is TDS and why? I've heard both of these opinions expressed quite freely over the past few years, without any association with Trump. However, most instances of TDS seem to not "derangement" but "normal human emotion to me." > It seems obvious to most people that institutional investors should not be allowed near single family homes What is obvious about this? They have always invested in single family hom…

Homes are for people to live in, not asset classes for investors to play with.

There, you have the apparently obscure principle that no one has ever heard of. I’d love to hear whatever economist inspired argument against it lol.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#116

Post by potato3732842 »

bdcravens wrote: post #96
lif wrote: post #4

What about the many, many thousands of homes that have already been bought up?

IF it results in dramatic reduction of home prices, this sounds great at first, but in actuality, it throws the market into disarray, since many sellers and also buyers, and it may trap home owners who need to sell into bankruptcy.

God forbid someone not sell out of their home. /s Home ownership isn't exactly a crappy life milestone to be stuck at. Yeah it would suck for a select few people who need to get out of one and into another RFN due to life reasons and surely some municipalities would leverage that to really screw people but I think the upside is orders of magnitude higher than the downside.

Come to think of it, I bet making homes less liquid would knock the divorce rate down more than anyone wants to believe it would, lol

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#117

Post by bongodongobob »

gsibble wrote: post #99
roadside_picnic wrote: post #48

The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…

Yeah, that's why Blackstone's stock fell 9% on this news. It doesn't affect them at all.

[dead]

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#118

Post by mattmaroon »

georgeburdell wrote: post #52

This will help out home prices in a lot of lower priced markets, but do little in higher priced markets. In the Bay Area, many houses are bought up by non-occupying internationals. I've been in a couple of such houses. It's bizarre walking into a $5M+ hilltop mansion that's completely bare inside except for a token "student" living out of one room.

Banning people from other countries buying home is both more sensible and more practical than this, which is why very many countries do it.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#119

Post by threecheese »

londons_explore wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Making it hard for cities to deny all permission to build new housing through impossible zoning laws should also be on the cards.

Making this decision as a politician in this country is death to your career though; how could we incentivize our leaders to bite the hand that elects them?

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#120

Post by [deleted] »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #97
JoshTriplett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses. > Universities typically own housing as well. I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

> critical subsets of uses I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.

[deleted]
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