How about stopping all non-occupants from buying properties.
I don’t want to purchase property, so where do I live?
US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the enti…
> Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes. Suppose you had $100,000 in cash, and buy a house for $100,000. You'll not be paying 5% interest on a mortgage. But if you did not buy the house, you would be investing that $100,000 for a 5% return. So, you're either paying 5% on the mortgage, or foregoing 5% return for investing that money. The rich person is not getting a di…
Aren’t you forgetting something, like hmm, rent and appreciation?
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#323The 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…
Its true that its a small number, but when you look at the statistics as a function of "percentage of homes purchased in 2024" instead of "total percentage ownership of homes", it is a bit more substantial: My understanding is the number is closer to 2% for Institutional investors, and as high as 4% for major markets like Phoenix and Dallas.
What it will come down to is the exact wording of what Trump means by "large institutional investors" (his exact words on Truth).
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#324The 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…
Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.
This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society.
IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing.
Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction!
North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#325The 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's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing. The things that they do have mass…
> They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing.
Raising prices when you only have a tiny portion of the market does not work. People won't buy them when there's another house for less.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#326idk 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…
Just tax non primary residences at a much higher rate. Housing crisis solved.
As someone who generally hates taxes I support this. Taxes at best should be used to discourage externalities and rent seeking.
However, California even tried to repeal prop13 for non primary residence and it failed! So i'm not sure how popular this idea is.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends where you are https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow... |“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
"Corporations" is meaningless in this context. If you want to own a rental home in the US, you should set up an LLC, both for liability reasons and because it makes it easier to deal with taxes and expenses. In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy /…
> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse.
I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.
The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old The simple fact is, housing can either be affordable xor an investment[0]. Affordable means the prices are flat relative to inflation, which makes it a terrible investment. If it's a good investment, that means the price is going up faster than inflation, which quickly makes it unaffordable. [0] I want to be clear that I'm referring to housin…
Sure it can be an investment even with no capital gains, there's still income from charging rent.
Which still contributes to unaffordability.
A house bought for the purpose of renting out is a house that could have gone to someone who wanted to buy it. It creates upward pressure on housing prices.
I mean, I get it. There are some people that truly do want to rent a house because they know the living situation is temporary.
But we have a generation that was able to buy houses during an economic boom where you could buy a house with an entry-level job, and once that house was paid off, they started buying up houses with their extra money to rent out, and it was so lucrative that prices have skyrocketed and now people in their 20s can't buy houses without a decently lucrative job.
Obviously, there are many factors at work here, but buying or building houses with the intent to rent them out is certainly a contributor.
I just think about the fact that I bought my house in 2015 for about $340K, and it's now worth about $600K, an 80% climb in just 10 years, and I think that's absurd, not to mention a bad thing for society overall.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#329idk 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…
>There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live
It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern. Although if you're in medicine there is probably hope.
If only technology had progressed to an extent that we don't psychically need to be concentrated in 15-20 HCOL major metro areas to do most (if not all) office jobs.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.
Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.
>that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals
As someone that's renting because buying is impossible i think this would be fantastic. They should do it with Airbnb too.
Not American or in the US, this is problem everywhere now. People thinking they're entrepreneurs for gouging.
People will come up with all kinds of reasoning, its the property tax, it's migrants, its minimum wage, it's millennials, it's inflation ,when ultimately it's just that landlords will charge whatever they think they can get away.
and sometimes they'll try to charge in other ways...
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/...