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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

#501

Post by tshaddox »

Plasmoid wrote: post #464
tshaddox wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

It's not a coincidence that they have the same word in them. It's literally just the same word with the same definition and etymology in both cases. Rent is a payment demanded by property owners from people who want to make productive use of that property.

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

#502

Post by mapontosevenths »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #402
jazzyjackson wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! N…

> they do create supply and maintain housing. Clearly you have never interacted with most land lords

Back when I was a renter mine just created slums and maintained misery, but maybe he was special.

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

#503

Post by Noaidi »

jcranberry wrote: post #498
Noaidi wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "Black rock isn't buying up all the housing" then how do you explain why Blackrock lost $17 billion in capital today? https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/200899449445747946... It matters, you just dont want to know it matters.

The tweet says blackstone. Thats a separate firm from blackrock. And the tweets misleading in the first place, it's looking at the bottom of a candle which wasn't even the current price at the time of the photograph? And the stock closed at about 154. Besides all this says is that it matters for blackstone...not for the housing market at large.

Ohhhh, sorry for my typo...

> Besides all this says is that it matters for blackstone...not for the housing market at large.

It means that blackstone cares about this, which means they like buying houses, which means it matters.

And the stock dropped 6% today. That is what matters.

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

#504

Post by mrcode007 »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #462
observationist wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expla…

It’s not gobbledygook. I think for most people it’s hard to grasp the scale of the entire industries outside of their area of professional expertise so you can look at some numbers here:

https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/mortgage-market-and-hous...

https://www.sifma.org/issues/market-structure/housing-financ...

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

#505

Post by dheera »

estearum wrote: post #375
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, 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.

If you tax land the only thing you will end up with is higher rents. You are punishing the wrong people.

Want to punish the right people? Cut taxes so that people can save cash faster, afford houses earlier and stop renting from their landlords.

Build more actually-affordable housing, too. Not these blocks of luxury apartments with swimming pools that nobody uses. (See HDB, Singapore -- that’s what the US needs more of)

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

#506

Post by tadfisher »

mikepurvis wrote: post #341
jazzyjackson wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! N…

I'm not sure if this is what you mean by secret society, but I could well imagine that these kind of limits would be hard to enforce. Like a person creates shell corporations to own their properties on their behalf, or buys them in the name of their kids, or employs randos to "own" pieces of their portfolio.

They already do these things to take advantage of "primary residence" or "first-time home buyer" incentives; see the big hullabaloo over Letitia James doing it by accident.

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

#507

Post by Plasmoid »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #499
Plasmoid wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting out property isn't rent seeking.

Ok. I'll bite. Why is the thing thats literallly the basis for the term rent seeking not rent seeking?

Because:

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)

Given that renting out property you own doesn't meet this definition it can categorically not be called rent seeking. I'm always shocked that people apply this definition exclusively to property rentals, and not VHS rentals, without seeing the hypocrisy.

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

#508

Post by Aurornis »

newtonsmethod wrote: post #78
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…

I agree with the first half of what you posted, but immediately jumping to blaming tariffs in your last paragraph seems weak (and a slight attempt at a gotcha). Concrete, gypsum and steel are primarily domestically produced. Similar goes for wood (although a substantial amount is imported, e.g. from Canada - the tariffs range from 25% to 50%). Labour & Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50…

Tariffs on products like lumber and cabinetry were introduced or raise on January 1st of this year. It's an additional factor that will make a bad situation worse.

You can't tell me that increasing the pricing of construction materials won't have negative pressure on home construction.

> Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50% of this is likely materials, with likely a minority of the materials tariffed.

And where does the construction equipment come from? The parts to repair that construction equipment? The parts that go into the trucks that the workers drive to the job site?

Focusing on a single input is myopic when the tariffs are so widespread that they touch everything.

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

#509

Post by Plasmoid »

tshaddox wrote: post #501
Plasmoid wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People assume that renting out property is rent-seeking literally only because they both have the word rent in them. It's not a coincidence that they have the same word in them. It's literally just the same word with the same definition and etymology in both cases. Rent is a payment demanded by property owners from people who want to make productive use of that property.

But rent-seeking isn't renting. They're different terms that don't have anything to do with each anymore.

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)

This definition doesn't overlap with renting.

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

#510

Post by kapone »

estearum wrote: post #365
observationist wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in order to raise or lower prices in an area, or using other mechanics to manipulate pricing, across the entire market, depending on the intended actions. If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area, if they intend to ren…

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.

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