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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

#461

Post by conradev »

observationist wrote: post #283
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'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…

An article making that case: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

A rebuttal to that article from Derek Thompson: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-abundance-critique-...

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

#462

Post by BenFranklin100 »

observationist wrote: post #283
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'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…

Supply and demand sets prices.

The gobbledygook you posted, “ 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”, is just that, gobbledygook.

Just because a buyer as Inc. behind its name doesn’t give it magical powers to set market prices.

If you think it does, then please explain it to us like we are really slow.

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

#463

Post by no_wizard »

kiba wrote: post #381
bs7280 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point, and this tax would need to be well thought out. I specifically would increase the tax rate the more properties an entity owns (Not a lawyer so IDK how to treat one guy owning 10 companies as 1 entity the right way). That way smaller local landlord's can still exist (and keep rental prices competitive), but massive orgs will be forced to sell properties. The idea is to create a disincentive for h…

The problem is not owning multiple properties, but untaxed land ownership. There's a prexisting solution for what you want to solve. It's called the Land Value Tax, which imposes a tax on land, but not on buildings and other improvement. Property tax has a known problem of taxing improvement in addition to land, which constrict urban development. Plus, imposing additional property tax means improvements are further p…

This should be the top comment IMO. Land Value Tax, coupled with much saner zoning laws and removing artificial restrictions on safe building proposals, would be the 1-2-3 move to resolving many of the worst aspects of the housing issues we face, as well as resolve many of the worst aspects of owning a home, IE having to defer proper maintenance simply to avoid a big tax adjustment

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

#464

Post by Plasmoid »

tshaddox wrote: post #385
kiba wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country. IF you want affordability? Tax land. Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wa…

> Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. Let's ignore property management for now and focus on landlords (i.e. people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job. Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking.

Let's expand on this.

People assume that renting out property is rent-seeking literally only because they both have the word rent in them.

I would note that people don't use the word rent-seeker (or parasite) when it comes to banks renting out money. I assume this is partly because banks use the word `loan` and partly because referring to bankers as parasites would be a little too close to dog-whistle antisemitism.

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

#465

Post by svieira »

estearum wrote: post #433
derangedHorse wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So when you build a sewage farm on your back 40 you should get wealthier (while your neighbors thank you because their land tax went down), but if someone snaps a photo of your area that goes viral on {THE PLATFORM DU JOUR} thus making your county more popular and driving up a bidding war for postage stamp sized lots of land (leading to the land being valued at a higher rate than it was a year before) you suddenly have a massive tax bill because "we noticed you are living in a popular county" and the benefits of living in a popular place should be taxed away? Or do we need some kind of a standard for "more valuable" that deals only with tangible things? And if so, which tangibles?

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

#466

Post by FireBeyond »

potato3732842 wrote: post #157
Aurornis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The material costs are high too because of regulations that require specific lumber for framing etc. Having done some extensive remodeling and building work in recent years and going to great lengths to follow building codes, this just isn't it. The type of lumber you can use for most framing jobs isn't that special. Having walked through a number of new construction properties and seeing what passes code, I don't…

Single and few number family residential and owner stuff gets all sorts of exemptions in just about every town's zoning code because if not the townsfolk would revolt. This is why everyone on the internet screeches "well I put up a deck and it wasn't so hard". Try and do a new build of literally any structure and get back to me. Or worse, a construction type that is not the regional default for whatever it is you're…

> Unless you know a guy, in which case it's all open doors and green lights because that's how local politics always is.

LOL, in my city, which is the capital city of our state, the city planning committee and property developers are all friends. By which I don't mean "having a drink at a community event", I mean openly posting on social media about their families going on vacation together, "Loved our family spending the week at this airbnb with the X family! So many good times and memories!"

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

#467

Post by rayiner »

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…

Correct. More specifically, your upper middle class neighbors whose incomes have grown far more than middle earners over the past few decades: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/cb...

The people responsible for the cost crunch middle class people feel isn’t billionaires. Bezos isn’t using his money to buy up houses or daycare spots in your neighborhood or Disney Word tickets. It’s upper quantile white collar workers. They are competing with the middle class for the same goods and services, but make much more money relatively than they did in past decades.

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

#468

Post by twoodfin »

iknowSFR wrote: post #290
robotsquidward wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect for a big splashy press release. Populist policy with no practical benefit to the average American.

I worked with these firms for several years when the business concept was in its earlier stages. The money coming in to buy these homes quickly went from family offices (2013-2019) to state pension funds (2019-present) to sovereign funds (2020-present). Things like the largest pension fund in Sweden is invested in buying SFR. Or the sovereign fund of the UAE. I’m not sure if that changed your opinion on this not havi…

More demand for homes makes homes more valuable and encourages more supply!

Why is this a problem? Build more homes, get rich from the Swedes!

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

#469

Post by austhrow743 »

rgmerk wrote: post #165

It will make very little difference in the end. Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities. If you want housing to be…

>It will make very little difference in the end.

It will make very little difference if Wall Street investors hold very little property.

Putting a finger on the scale of how much real estate is individually owned definitely makes a difference though. It makes it worse.

100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties.

>If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.

Yes. However supply is artificially restricted by government, to the approval of the average property owning voter. So more specifically, that is what needs to be changed. Everything else is window-dressing.

This is a country sliding further towards being us, with their housing being more restricted and more expensive.

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

#470

Post by psunavy03 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #421
rgmerk wrote: post #165

It will make very little difference in the end. Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities. If you want housing to be…

The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that. In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments. The "American Dream" is a single-family-home, surrounded by other single-family homes, but even with urban sprawl we simply run int…

No, we threw it away because executives wanted their control fantasy of being able to push people around like little chess pieces, as opposed to setting a vision, hiring professionals, and then giving them the tools to achieve the vision and staying the hell out of their way.
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