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A Postmortem of a Startup

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Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#101

Post by antisthenes »

clpm4j wrote: post #98

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) sing…

The solution to the housing crisis is letting people build "not quite up to code" structures and relaxing zoning.

This means heavy handedly forcing local municipalities to change zoning.

A lot of people don't like that.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#102

Post by clpm4j »

socalgal2 wrote: post #100
clpm4j wrote: post #98

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) sing…

Why would that be a solution? What's the difference between the LLC that buys a bunch of homes and the LLC the builds bunch of homes. When the homes are done being built the LLC has morphed from an LLC that builds homes to an LLC that bought a bunch of homes. The solution to me is to stop preventing people and companies from building homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWs7dqaWfY Effectively, goverments and nimby…

The solution lies in eliminating the entire concept of investment properties, and to classify single-homes as purely places to live. You do realize that part of "not enough" houses is due to corporate entities / investment vehicles / investors owning many properties.

And the types of cities (dense, highly-desirable urban cities like SF, London, Paris) where the NIMBY people complain most often also happen to be the most common markets for these investors to purchase/own multiple homes.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#103

Post by matt-p »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #89
matt-p wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arguably asset price is built on scarcity vs demand everything else is all second order really.

No, asset price is built on yield, not on scarcity. That is exactly my point. It's a bit brain-melting, but once you realise it, the talk of NIMBY-ism etc. is just irrelevant. If you add more assets with a good yield, assuming that yield is better than bonds etc., then those assets will get bought. The only other brake on that is diversity of portfolios, but it doesn't strike me as particularly important, especially…

Yes, but isn't yield due to scarcity?

For example right now there's more demand than supply for a 2 bed house for £2000pcm, but if we doubled the supply then there'd be competition and we'd end up at a much lower price?

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#104

Post by matt-p »

froddd wrote: post #85
matt-p wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reductionist in this case is not a bad thing. We need a major change to fix this situation and doing some little tweaks like increasing taxes on second homes or holiday homes does not actually fix this (we already tax those specific cases, with things like second home stamp duty or in some areas second home council tax). You have A - Demand (immigration of 1 Million per year) Or B - Supply (building only 120,000 hous…

Holiday homes have quite the impact in many parts of Wales. Occupancy ratings per house seem to be quite low on average [1], but weirdly I can’t seem to find any figures for overall occupancy. [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/... Edit: clarification

Maybe on a hyper local basis, but beware there will be negatives with flushing them out too.

On a national scale I'm afraid it's just not statistically significant.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#105

Post by morsecodist »

clpm4j wrote: post #98

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) sing…

I agree that the core problem of housing affordability is that housing serves a dual role as an investment and a place to live. But I think this policy will not do very much and in isolation would even be counterproductive.

Why focus on single family homes? If corporate ownership is as bad as you are framing it then why is it OK for someone who lives in an apartment to be advantage of? Worse still, these entities would still want to invest in real estate so presumably they would invest even more in multi-family properties. If their ownership is what causes unaffordability, are you not making things even worse for people who live in multi-family housing?

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#106

Post by DrBazza »

clpm4j wrote: post #98

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) sing…

One cause of the UK's 'housing crisis' (or rather un-affordability), just like other countries I suppose, is simply that if I buy other properties, I get: capital appreciation on the asset, and return on investment (by renting it out).

Offer me a £500k passive investment that makes the same returns with the same guarantees, and I'll take that over a house.

Except they don't. No other investment comes close for the British middle classes with that sort of extra cash. And the UK government will tax you to the hilt on everything else.

Exacerbating the problem, is that you can get a bank loan for additional properties.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#107

Post by DrBazza »

antisthenes wrote: post #101
clpm4j wrote: post #98

If a government truly wanted to fix a housing "crisis", wouldn't a ban on any type of corporate entity from buying single-family homes be an efficient solution? E.g., LLC's can no longer purchase single-family homes. Only real, live human individuals can purchase single-family homes. They could also try to implement some type of ban on any single individual person from purchasing more than 1 (or choose a number) sing…

The solution to the housing crisis is letting people build "not quite up to code" structures and relaxing zoning. This means heavy handedly forcing local municipalities to change zoning. A lot of people don't like that.

Zoning is a US thing. The article refers to the UK housing problem and we don't really have that problem, but I suppose that might fix the US market.

UK houses are a good investment, in fact the best investment for £500k, and also their price is additionally inflated by 'cheap money' and dual incomes.

Can't quite afford that house that's current 'under offer' at £500k? You might be able to find a bank that will lend you just that little bit more. 5.5x your salary? No problem. Congratulations, the bank has just helped push house prices that little bit higher. In the UK in the 1970s the single income 3x mortgage multiplier was on its last legs. Now it's 4+ times your joint salary. Madness.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#108

Post by jamil7 »

matt-p wrote: post #103
rhubarbtree wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, asset price is built on yield, not on scarcity. That is exactly my point. It's a bit brain-melting, but once you realise it, the talk of NIMBY-ism etc. is just irrelevant. If you add more assets with a good yield, assuming that yield is better than bonds etc., then those assets will get bought. The only other brake on that is diversity of portfolios, but it doesn't strike me as particularly important, especially…

Yes, but isn't yield due to scarcity? For example right now there's more demand than supply for a 2 bed house for £2000pcm, but if we doubled the supply then there'd be competition and we'd end up at a much lower price?

This assumes the population of a city is fixed.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#109

Post by kengoa »

Very interesting read, I wish more startups did postmortems like this. It seems like the authors managed to build a set of tools that provided real value that ultimately did not make commercial sense, but would've been interesting to see if this learning:

> Scout was our most-used product. Its users weren’t our target market, but some were. We had vague ambitions to use it as an inbound marketing tool, but we never capitalised on it. This was a missed opportunity.

was applicable in a conservative industry like real estate and government as lots of open-core companies operate on this model (e.g. free open-source software and marked-up hosted solutions).

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#110

Post by dccoolgai »

hinkley wrote: post #94
mytailorisrich wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning permission is partly a political issue, partly down to expertise. You need experience, you need to know the rules, you need to know the tricks, you need to know how to draft the application. You need to know the game. Indeed this is not something that is waiting for a technical solution. It's great that they tried, though. But it strikes me that they seem to be 20 something students (not meant disparagingly)…

My ex worked at a government contractor and they started paying the guy who wrote grant proposals more than the CEO because without grants they were fucked, and the grant writer was getting wistful for other horizons. Talking to government is a highly compensated skill set. That’s all lobbyists are.

Bingo, and most engineers have zero clue or respect for this skillset. Even traditional PMs / business dev types don't know what they don't know about how to talk with government or government-adjacent businesses. I've worked for at least 3 companies who had high hopes for building on state/municipal/higher-ed revenue and talked it up in their internal meetings, but when you would ask the CEO/CFO where their government affairs team was, they would look at you like you were speaking Latin. They basically just planned to take their consumer sales motion and apply it to these areas, which fails hilariously almost every time.
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