US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by derangedHorse » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

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.

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

I'm not sure what this applies to with regards to my original comment. Improvements, insurance, and taxes are capital expenditures which need to be managed. This was to counter that landlording "is simply owning an asset."

> 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.

Why assume that the landlord isn't getting the brunt of the cost for making the community more valuable? I don't think there's a strong case for saying a property manager is a job while denying landlording being one. Assuming landlording is completely passive is as far-fetched as thinking that property management is completely passive (both may require irregularly tasks to be performed or require no involvement in the ideal case).

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

#482

Post by bluGill » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #374

bluGill wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they then rent these houses out and keep them maintained I don't care that they own them. Of course they should not be allowed to have a monopoly on houses in any area (including indirect monopoly by agreeing to minimum prices with others). Landlord is an important job that someone needs to do for the people who owning their own house is the wrong decision.

Even if they are the leader in percentage point rent raises, and do it 5x as often as every other landlord? And blackball a renter they don't like, not from 1 specific house, but from 10K all at once?

they don't have a monopoly so the problem is imangined

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

#483

Post by hopelite » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

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…

I agree, but besides the fact that people overlook that the “C” in LLC is “Corporate” and most private rental investors will have put their real estate in an LLC; is that the real problem at the core is cheap, i.e., devalued money and low lending standards, that has made inefficient and reckless lending and investing possible, essentially the inverse of the BNPL ticking time bomb and the cousin of the housing bubble, i.e., fraud.

With house prices being driven up by reckless lending through a debased currency, you enter a feedback loop where every inflating currencies drive prices higher, which only fuels a further frenzy of lending (including through FOMO) to driver prices higher once again.

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

#484

Post by intrasight » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #411

WalterBright wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Going by the graph in the article, that's still ~13% of homes owned by investors with >5 properties. And that's total of what is currently held, it speaks nothing of liquidity. That number likely includes investors who have had that property for a long time, the current property buy-up likely means far greater than 13% of the market right now is going to those sorts of aggregators. Dropping the price of a house by a…

>Personally, I think unoccupied homes in general ought to be penalized

As is done in the UK

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

#485

Post by cyberax » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #380

cyberax wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sounds backwards? Nope. The ONLY way to get cheaper housing is by reducing the city population. > Supply and demand. Sigh. No. You assume that the demand is fixed. It's not. By building new housing, you _increase_ the demand. And always faster than you can satisfy it. I just love this example: Forbes 2016 - "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build", "The Great Urban Myth: 'Cities Can't Build T…

> Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper. Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?

Not quite. But there ARE examples where the price growth was stopped by providing alternative options to the cycle of ever-densification.

A really good example is Copenhagen, the world's most liveable city. Its current population is still _less_ than during the 1970's peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope... The driver for the decrease was suburban migration, as cars became more accessible.

The US _itself_ is a great example. The suburban development created cheap housing for the rapidly growing population in 60-s.

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

#486

Post by standardUser » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

thekyle wrote: post #456

standardUser wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilizing vacant properties is easier and cheaper than building new ones, by a massive margin. We should do both, but ignoring perfectly good homes in desirable locations being used by nobody is silly.

If the goal is to reduce the number of vacant homes, then why not create a tax on those specifically. Corporate owned homes and vacant homes are not the same thing at all.

If a home isn't the sole primary residence of a person, it's essentially "vacant" and should be taxed, imho.

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

#487

Post by hopelite » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

mycodebreaks wrote: post #261

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…

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.

That would not be useful. A far better solution would be to drive up rates to make/force landlords unload properties they could only afford at lower rates and also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. It’s basic supply and demand, but ironically the immigrant supporters are allied with the billionaires and generally wealthy who profit from piling in ever more people into the same supply of housing and amenities and resources.

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

#488

Post by FarmerPotato » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:22 PM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #189

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.

Why should you be allowed to create a corporation that has no actual purpose other than a shield for your own private concerns?

There are lots of benefits to putting your home into a living trust. It just has one side effect of hiding your name on public GIS of tax parcels. One reason to do a trust is so that you can alter who benefits from it without amending a will.

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

#489

Post by davidw » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #419

estearum wrote: post #365

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.

Eh, reforms are starting to happen, like here in Oregon.

https://bendbulletin.com/2025/12/13/middle-housing-slowly-de...

Or this:

https://bendyimby.com/2025/06/12/detached-townhomes-come-to-...

And it continues:

https://www.sightline.org/2025/06/04/oregons-zoning-reforms-...

It generally does not drop values, just allows for cheaper options.

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

#490

Post by 6510 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

I have this idea where we pick a desert road as long as possible (maybe road 50 Nevada) then build a 50 000 metric ton machine that makes large rammed earth houses. Perhaps make a mold the shape of a Ferris wheel. Have it stamp out 200 homes per week (2 miles) Road 50 is 400 miles so 200 weeks.

Rammed earth is a very decent building material but if you make the walls thick and compress it hard enough (maybe add steam?) it will last hundreds of years. Other building methods should be considered ofc domed roofs are perhaps not cool enough.

Disassemble the machine, ship the containers and deploy it some place else.

Add some killer features to the homes so that people cant wait to live there. For the first 400 miles at least $30 billion comes out (over 30 years) or $15 bl per year for each year of construction. Should be good enough for investors.

If it works, build additional improved versions. Aim for a factory that makes these machines.