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

#611

Post by gfaster » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

alextingle wrote: post #595

gfaster wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gp used "rent seeking" correctly. The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".

You should read the wiki article. Criticising landlords is fine, but words (and phrases) have actual meanings, and the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords.

I am well aware of what the phrase means, and I re-read the Wikipedia article to be sure. Maybe you read the use of the word in a different way than I did, but I helpfully included my precise interpretation of it in my comment to clarify the meaning.

> the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords

Having "literally no place" is certainly a strong choice of words, particularity as it was introduced in this thread as being a inaccurate label to apply to landlords.

Personally, I first learned about the term applying it to Feudalism, in which the (land)lords' only contribution was their ownership of the land. That example alone seems to pretty handily disprove your claim of "literally no place", in fact it's specifically cited in the Wikipedia article as the Georgist interpretation of economic rent.

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

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Post by ebbi » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

ropable wrote: post #570

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 c…

It's the same in New Zealand - property is the primary mechanism for wealth creation, and you have boomers with 10+ properties that they use for rental income for their retirement.

The issue is exacerbated by the tax structures not incentivizing investments in other assets - e.g. in NZ if you invest over $50k in offshore equities, there is an annual FIF tax that must be paid, even for unrealized gains.

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

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Post by j4kp07 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

jasonfarnon wrote: post #557

gbear605 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who has someone who has repeatedly threatened to assault her, and her primary protection is keeping her address hidden from him. Should she never be allowed to own a house at risk of being assaulted?

Maybe have a limited exception then, like rape shield laws. You don't need to gut the entire framework for this rare situation. (Plus it would be fun to watch corporate lawyers try to exploit this loophole.)

[dead]

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

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Post by nerdponx » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

pixelatedindex wrote: post #589

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…

> IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. But sure they maintain houses. Although just the bare minimum, they will never fix it nicely - just enough to rent it out.

The actual value of landlording is offloading financial risk. The tenant pays a stable rent including a premium in exchange for maintenance, repairs, and not having to sell a home in order to move to a new one.

I just can't bring myself to agree with the hard-line socialists who think landlording is fundamentally a bad thing. There are a lot of problems with it, but it does have a legitimate place in the world.

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

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Post by BobbyJo » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

gbear605 wrote: post #545

klipklop wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I feel people and especially corporations/REITs do not have the right to hide what real estate they own. Sure put it in a trust, but the public has the right to know who controls it.

I have a friend who has someone who has repeatedly threatened to assault her, and her primary protection is keeping her address hidden from him. Should she never be allowed to own a house at risk of being assaulted?

I think its pretty easy to separate investment properties from primary residences when it comes to transparency requirements.

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

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Post by nerdponx » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

estearum wrote: post #370

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…

No, the real problem is that the vast majority of their income does not come from their role in creating supply or maintaining housing. Proof: Propose a 100% land value tax, which definitionally only removes that part of income that is generated by the community around their property, and see if they go for it.

The actual value of a landlord is insulating the tenant from financial risk, charging a predictable rent and absorbing the costs of repairs and maintenance. That's a lot of value for some people, but it also comes with problematic incentives and obvious bad outcomes when combined with other aspects of housing markets.

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

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Post by brightball » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #478

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…

You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't. I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman th…

About 2 miles from my house, a housing development recently went up.

No homes for sale. Rent only.

Stuff like that is becoming a big problem.

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

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Post by danny_codes » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Existing property owners can only afford to hold this opinion because land rents are insufficiently taxed. Through some sort of monumental stupidity we decided to tax labor instead of land. In this sense the SFH, “Americans like suburbia” problem is just a function of poor tax strategy. If homeowners were faced with the economic reality of their choices then markets would fix land use by themselves.

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

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Post by corpoposter » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #432

gen220 wrote: 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 aff…

LVT is a tax on the value of the land specifically, not a traditional property tax. This encourages development on valuable land that is currently being put to unproductive uses.

For example, if you own a lot in a downtown metro which is a parking lot you pay low property taxes because parking lots have low property values. You are disincentivised to develop it because your property tax would go up. Opposite incentives with a LVT.

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

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Post by tootie » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:28 AM 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…

There is no key word here. It's an aspirational assertion on social media. Everyone asking about how it will be implemented is asking questions Trump has spent zero seconds considering. He will maybe sign some EO that will have very limited scope but mostly he is asking Congress to figure it out. Given the makeup of the Senate it will require bipartisan support which means at least months of haggling if they even consider his request. So we really have no idea what the policy will be or when we'll see it.