Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#431
the carve outs will be insane and defeat the whole point

absolutely, easily predictable

what should be a one page bill will have riders of insanity

they'll probably do it like they do with corporations having more than 15 employees, so every little business just has 15 people contracting out to the next business with 15 people etc., there will be a corporation for every 15 houses etc.

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

#432
post #393

Churchill was right! We’ll try everything except for a land value tax, so that we can eventually prove once and for all that LVT is the right thing to do! :) But actually, it’s good to see movement on the underlying problem (affordability of home ownership). This is The Domestic American Problem of our times, and it deserves to be closer to the center of the Overton window of our politics and policy-making. Even if w…

Can someone please explain to me a practical way to apply the LVT? Vancouver used to have an LVT, it was too low and there was a housing speculation bubble in the early 1900s, since property was appreciating much faster than the tax rate. And if the LVT is too high, then you will have very little new development. This isn't even mentioning how you determine the value of the land.

Denmark has an LVT and copenhagen affordability is... not good.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Landlord, or property management, This is literally not true. A landlord owns the property. Property managers operate the property. Sometimes these are the same people (in mom and pop scenarios), but typically and at scale they certainly are not. Property management is a job. Landlording is not. It is simply owning an asset. +1 on taxing land though.

Landlords have to allocate capital to fixing and improving the house, as well as taking care of insurance and taxes. Also, assuming that they're not living in the house and the value of the home goes up, they're taxes will rise whenever an appraiser reassesses their home value.

All improvements are excluded from a land value tax, which actually means improvements are even more incentivized.

Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.

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

#434

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…

Where I live, in the fastest growing big city in the US, it is absolutely commercial investment firms buying up all the homes. I used to get calls several times a week from these guys want to buy my house in cash. I stopped taking their calls and now it has slowed to only a few calls per month.

The last call I took, last year, they were ready to buy my house in cash at market value without looking at the property.

The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are rentals, and there are thousands of houses in my neighborhood under the same HOA.

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

#435
post #408

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.

I've dealt with both; anecdotal but I had a much better experience with the individual landlord than corporate. Ex: AC went out in both cases; Individual land lord showed up with a replacement window unit the next day after I reported it. Corpo landleech ignored my ticket and calls for 3 days while I slept in a house that was nearly 90F inside past midnight. Corpo landleeches nickle and dime you (base rent + rent pay…

The two times I’ve stayed in an apartment complex, they had staff onsite and repairmen and someone on call. The individual landlord doing this on the side is likely undercapitalized and operating on thin margins and not budgeting for repairs

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

#436

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…

Moreover, the fundamental problem is lack of supply.

Building has not kept pace with growth in households.

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely silly. Prices are high because we don't build enough houses which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, then the houses we have built are all owned by empty nesters and people with 1 - 3 investment properties. Everything else you're describing is completely ridiculous.

> which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, Assuming you're referring to the typical high CoL areas, the shortage has very little to do with the expense of building. The zoning laws don't permit sufficient supply in those areas. And that's quite unlikely to change (at least quickly) because anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth.

Not true.

Cost of living is high because local incomes are high which increases the price of land and labor which increases the price of building.

Restrictive zoning is bad for lots of reasons, but solving it does not solve affordability.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694

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

#439
So close to realizing the issues with the 2018 tax bill.

- 20% maximum corporate tax

- Personal Salt cap

Made it less expensive for an llc to buy a home than for most individuals.

To make individual ownership on par with corporate, individuals need to be in a lower tax bracket, be able to deduct taxes , interest, and insurance. And the $10k cap really hurt the ability for local property taxes to make it better for the individual. The new $40k cap may put it slightly towards the individual in some jurisdictions.

But raising corporate rates or reducing corporate deductible expense re real estate is the most efficient policy to encourage individual ownership.

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

#440

Earlier 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.

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause. Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market. The problem is when people who want t…

Landlords owning property is not a problem.

Correct.

It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system

To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.

Post reply on HN