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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

#561

Post by noisy_boy »

gregw134 wrote: post #528
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's a good start. Would be nice to add a gradually increasing tax on multiple home purchases, e.g. buying a third home has a 5% tax, 4th 15% tax, fifth 25%, and if you want a sixth home you have to build it yourself. Would prevent regular people from buying up dozens of homes to rent.

It should be much more punishing from the 4th home like 45%. One can understand 2/3 homes, e.g., one to live in and the rest as investment for retirement income. More than that is just greed. Also, if you don't live in one of your properties, either sell one to keep the total number within 3 or pay additional tax.

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

#562

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

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

#563

Post by alextingle »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #324
mycodebreaks wrote: post #261

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 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…

"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property.

Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.

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

#564

Post by Aurornis »

SirFatty wrote: post #84
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…

Everything you stated is speculation.

Well as soon as you find someone who can speak about the future of the housing market without speculating, let me know.

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

#565

Post by mint5 »

Why is it as a soon as a politician announces they will start in the future to have a concept of a plan at tackling an issue, many people react as if it’s already done?

No actual implementation steps have been taken or explained. Will this happen before or after the health care plans are released? Before or after the still pending infrastructure bill?

“ Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban, which he would also call on Congress to codify in law. *It was not clear what steps he would take*”

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

#566

Post by Aurornis »

TZubiri wrote: post #82
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…

Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor. That's quite an extreme political take. A more humble basic economic theory question would be: If you ban large institutional investors f…

> That's quite an extreme political take.

We're in a weird timeline when pointing out that dramatic tax increases on the inputs to home building will increase the price of homes.

> A more humble basic economic theory question would be:

> If you ban large institutional investors from buying homes, and then you ban small institutional investors from buying homes. And only owners directly can buy homes, no renting. Would that be good?

There's nothing humble or basic about this question because it's so unrealistic that it could never possibly happen. Ban renting? What?

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

#567

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

    > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth.
This what Obama calls the false choice dichotomy -- "Damned if you do, damned if you don't." In your scenario, if we build more homes, then existing home owners are "obliterated". This is untrue. We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.

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

#568

Post by m463 »

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…

I've heard that japan has a system that keeps real estate dynamic with lower prices.

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

#569

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

deepsun wrote: post #546
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…

> landlords are rent seeking and nothing else Noone says it's nothing else. But rent seeking is a big component of it, you just focus on other minor parts. In general, locking down some limited but critical commodity (e.g. land) is bad for any economic system. It doesn't really matter whether it's "Wall Street" or "your neighbor". A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value.

I am trying to read this charitably, but it is hard to read as anything but: 'landlords do not add value'.

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

#570

Post by ropable »

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…

In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment, a primary mechanism for wealth creation (rather than an essential for life) for far too long. I fully agree that supply is the #1 driver for housing affordability, but like many things it's mult-factorial. Tax incentives, market forces, town planning, land use regulation, etc. all play their role.

I'm hopeful that successive governments over here show the courage of their convictions and enact enough change that my kids have a chance of getting into their own places, same as I did.

Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses? It's all very well saying "That's what the market wants" when that's also all the market supplies. How do we bootstrap the idea of smaller, denser, affordable, more-diverse housing options?

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