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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

#871

Post by alistairSH »

pianopatrick wrote: post #601

I'd be fine with a policy of "you can rent housing you build" for American corporations. If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world. Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.

Need to think about this some... Would this end up being another way for MegaCorp to extract wealth from the rest of us (similar to student loans)? All new housing ends up rentals, and a generation+ of Americans are unable to use homes for storing/building wealth?

We know using housing as an investment, at an individual level, is problematic (NIMBYism and failure to infill/redevelop/etc). Not sure how incentivizing MegaCorp to do the same on a massive scale fixes anything?

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

#872

Post by radpanda »

zahlman wrote: post #738
m4ck_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industri…

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from It's strange to me that moving to LCOL wasn't a much bigger thing during the period when everyone was working remotely.

It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.

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

#873

Post by _3u10 »

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…

Exactly, everyone is for affordability but no one wants their primary residency to be worth 50% less in 5 years.

Housing affordability is inherently unpopular with voters.

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

#874

Post by richwater »

class3shock wrote: post #841

"Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up... As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entra…

> the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units

This is a government policy failure. Because no one is allowed to build fast enough, there is always a demand for luxury (higher profit) and thus that is what gets built.

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

#875

Post by baggachipz »

gadders wrote: post #860
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…

>>If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing. You can also look at reducing demand due to mass migration.

Yeah, start wars with NATO allies and people will flee your country like it's 1940.

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

#876

Post by misja111 »

observationist wrote: post #357
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…

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…

> it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell

Earlier you were arguing that investors were acting as marketmakers and now you say this. Marketmakers make their profit from the difference between buying and selling some asset. They don't want to hold prices, they want turnover. If investors really are acting as marketmakers it's actually a good thing because marketmakers have the effect of adding liquidity to a market.

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

#877

Post by xbar »

Actually, not a bad policy idea. But it is not enough to solve the set of problems that arise when you take a basic human need (housing) and subject it to market forces--inexorably the ability to profit from the need drives costs higher than is affordable for some "market participants," leading to death.

Small investor ownership in single-family homes (for both short- and long-term rentals) have been devastating to communities. What is the right number of single-family homes to permit individuals/trusts to own and how do you disincentivize small empires?

Wall Street investor monopoly ownership of dense housing in urban areas remains a major cause of rents outstripping income (see Blackrock's 2020-2025 market takeover and subsequent market manipulation of apartment rental rates in San Diego). Simple policy solution: trust-bust apartment ownership. Harder, more effective policy solution: municipality ownership of apartment blocks a la European cities.

If regulators allow the same behaviors with water, you can expect a similar set of harms.

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

#878

Post by xnx »

a2tech wrote: post #834
rgmerk wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YIMBYs would argue (and in my view rightly) that if you allow townhouses and apartments to be built, the market will build them where there is a demand.

The only problem is that in the US, if you let apartments and townhouses to be built, homeowners will get muscled out by large builder concerns and single family homes will be converted into dense housing--which sounds great, until you realize there's no way those housing concerns will SELL those units--they're going to be rented forever. There's no incentive to actually sell those to people and every reason to keep…

> homeowners will get muscled out by large builder concerns

> homeowners are being pushed out and their homes

What does this mean?

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

#880

Post by gosub100 »

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…

Black rock shouldn't buy any family homes. Not a single one.

I'm sick of the arguments that rely on the meaning of "most/many/some/not all". The arguments are irrefutable because you can always weasel your way through the meaning of the quantifier, or the false implication that only the "biggest" of something needs redress before the next in line.

A person owning a second home is fine, that's one of the paths towards financial independence: small business ownership. Someone starting out in a tiny money making operation is a good thing, and they do not need to compete with a trillion dollar empire!

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