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

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 1001 posts

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

#131

Post by Octoth0rpe »

Simulacra wrote: post #15
lif wrote: post #4

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

I'm not sure if they could be forced to sell those, the government could, but then that would fall under just compensation seizure. I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem under basic legal theory that you couldn't take those homes.

Not that I expect this particular strategy from this administration, but there's 'forced' as in "you WILL sell this property", and there's 'forced' as in "any corporate owned housing unit will see its property tax rate increase by 25% per year until it is sold to a person". I don't think your description could apply to the latter.

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

#132

Post by antonymoose »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
seydor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cannot be resold to other speculators their price can go waaay down

The vast majority of home purchases aren't from speculators or institutional investors. Institutional investors only own about 0.5% of homes. If they're forced to stop buying, nothing will really change in a noticeable way. At best, small landlords and investors will scoop attractive properties up for slightly less.

Is that 0.5% a uniform distribution across the United States or is it concentrated in a handful of hot markets? I suspect the latter and have to imagine some distortion must be occurring in those regions.

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

#133

Post by siliconc0w »

Yet again the Trump admin identifies an issue but misses the nuance. We want investors to encourage more homebuilding, the problem is more regional concentration - in regions where PE owns a big enough % of the homes that they can monopolize and control the rents. Or NIMBY policies (where the federal government could dock funding to states that don't build to match population growth).

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

#134

Post by ntonozzi »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
seydor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cannot be resold to other speculators their price can go waaay down

The vast majority of home purchases aren't from speculators or institutional investors. Institutional investors only own about 0.5% of homes. If they're forced to stop buying, nothing will really change in a noticeable way. At best, small landlords and investors will scoop attractive properties up for slightly less.

Maybe the best part of this legislation will be that people will realize it's not institutional investors that are driving up home prices. No, that's far too optimistic.

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

#135

Post by cyberax »

HappyPanacea wrote: post #58
cyberax wrote: post #25

It might help in the long term, as it can force cities to stop densifying. And as we all know by now, densification is the leading cause of unaffordability. The US has more houses than households, but people are forced by economic forces to move into denser and denser areas. But short-term it'll hurt availability. One of the most common ways to enshittify cities is buying an SFH, demolishing it, and plopping a 3-4 ap…

> And as we all know by now, densification is the leading cause of unaffordability. This is the first time I see this bold claim, what evidence do you have to prove it?

It's a simple observation. No large city in the US or Europe reduced the housing prices by increasing density. I gave an example of Tokyo in the other comment in this thread as an absolutely illustrative case.

The only price decreases happened only during the 2008 crisis and during the pandemic lockdowns, due to local population decreasing.

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

#136

Post by cmxch »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #23

One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.

So basically you want to give a loophole for Wall Street to cosplay as regular people.

No thanks.

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

#137

Post by alephnerd »

KumaBear wrote: post #124
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…

It might not solve the problem but we also have other countries buying up homes for pension accounts. Take AU for example doing this. Should be illegal regardless of the size.

Pension funds like Ontario Teacher's are institutional investors who would be barred as well according to this proposal.

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

#138

Post by JoshTriplett »

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.

> rich people

What part of "people at risk of doxing" made you jump to "rich people" rather than, for instance, "people in groups commonly attacked"?

> force them to act with consideration of the community

By doing what, precisely? "Have you tried not being (commonly attacked group here)?"

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

#139

Post by fourseventy »

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.

[flagged]

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

#140

Post by overfeed »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #66
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…

The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein,…

> governed by how much a bank will lend [...] Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years.

Banks typically won't hold onto to your loan for 30 years. Mortgages in the US have been thoroughly fiscalized: your typical bank/mortgage lender bundles up a bunch of loans and sells them to another servicing party as soon as the ink dries on the closing documents. The specialized servicer package them, and offer them as securities to investors who in turn will get a monthly return based on aggregate mortgage installments.

All this to say: lending banks would be happy to finance thousands upon thousands of 5-digit mortgages, and sell those to securitization specialists.

New houses aren't built in existing neighborhoods because dense housing is unpopular, as is a distaste of having "poorer" people as neighbors. Static zoning, terrible transport networks and no funding for new public infrastructure tag-team to discourage new developments on undeveloped farmland.

Post reply on HN