Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods • Hacker News Board

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#131

Post by lotsofpulp » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

marvin wrote: post #71

johndoe0815 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend here in Trondheim (third-largest city in Norway with 200k residents, of these ca. 40k are students) is that a lot of houses and apartments are explicitly offered for sale with plans for conversion to student apartments. Rents in the city have increased by 8.2% over the last 12 months, property prices by 20-25% over the last two years. The price per square meter to buy anything reasonable is above 6k Eur now…

Everyone is suggesting ineffective solutions with idiotic side effects. The proper way of solving this problem is to build a lot more homes. Otherwise you'll be creating a plan economy where bureaucrats are constantly scrambling to alleviate the side effects of their shuffling of deck-chairs on the sinking ship. But of course, few cities want to do this. The biggest cities in Norway are particularly bad at not even a…

I can envision a scenario where both are true and result in short term (possibly on the order of decades) pain for locals. The supply of housing is not meeting the demand of local residents and the supply of “desirable” investments in stable societies is not met for global investors.

It is an arbitrage and inefficiency scenario created by the ability of capital to move easily around the world, but not people.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#132

Post by jlokier » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #28

57844743385 wrote: post #6

The only way to make housing affordable is to end property investing.

How do you buy a house then? Does the government just own all housing?

You just buy a house the usual ways and live in it. With cash or a mortgage.

If you live in it, it's not called "property investing".

"Property investing" refers to buying property to benefit from price speculation and use as a store of value, without actually using the property as a home. The property may sit there empty most or all of the time, or it may be rented out, with a combination of rent and price speculation being the owner's business plan. "Flipping" may be involved.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#133

Post by rocqua » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

This is stupid.

It bans buying or renting. Our rental market is already very distorted because most rentals fall under regulations except for people just above modal incomes. That already leaves a gap for people not poor enough to be allowed regulated rent, and too poor to get an 700 a month mortgage, who are forced to rent at 900 a month.

If you want to hurt pure investors, tax un-lived in housing.

But really, we need to kill the mortgage tax credit for any new homes. That will reduce the value of land because it offers less tax benefits. At the same time, currently interest is low so it will barely effect new entrants. The key is to make houses worth a bit less. Homeowners are just going to have to suffer a slight dip after amazing gains for the last decades.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#134

Post by Aeolun » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:50 AM UTC

zihotki wrote: post #99

To add to the topic, in NL you, as an owner of a property, are obliged to report to municipality if your property is vacant for one year. This is to prevent squatting. Very recently U.S. investor Blackstone reported ~300 apartments at once in Amsterdam for being vacant. They did it only after it was found out that some of the properties were squatted. And according to different sources, the apartments were vacant for…

I think it’s interesting that we tend to believe that someone would actually report these things.

Then we get hit by these US (and other) foreign companies to whom morality is just a suggestion, and whom will happily do whatever makes them most money.

Now they’ve made literal millions out of these empty properties, and they’ll be given the benefit of the doubt, because that’s how we do things.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#135

Post by athrowaway3z » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:50 AM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #30

jhgb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do I understand correctly that they want to kick out all the students from the cities? Presumably not, unless those students are property investors.

I suppose the implied question is: who's going to rent to students if the landlords' investments get penalized for them not living there themselves. There's presumably too many students in these cities for all of them to find some family who have a spare room to rent.

The municipality can designate locations where these rules apply and they can designate if a location is intended for student housing.

I'm not seeing an issue that is directly exacerbated. There are simply more tools that can be (ab)used .

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#136

Post by mejutoco » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #58

capableweb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some greed might be innate, but what we're seeing today with billionaires is not normal greed, it's extreme greed, something me (and many others) don't think is innate. And where does "communism" come from? No one mentioned it here on HN nor in the article. People are so quick to label things, even if they are not even related. In this case, Dutch people seems to had enough of expensive prices so now they are on the…

> what we're seeing today with billionaires is not normal greed, it's extreme greed No, it's normal greed and, if anything, inequality is lower now than it has been in the past. What we have today is fat, comfortable people looking at billionaires and screaming greed because the billionaire has a yacht while they only have 3 cars and one massive house. Who's the greedy one here?

I was looking for data for inequality per country (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...).

What location and timeline are you thinking of for now being less inequal? Do you have a data source I could look into? Cheers

Edit: grammar

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#137

Post by vishnugupta » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #76

I may be biased because I moved recently to the Netherlands and looking to buy our first home and stop paying rent. But, the house prices are crazy out here. I work in tech and my wife is an academic. We earn what is definitely above market average, and it looks like we cannot afford most houses we find in the area where we are renting now(well outside Amsterdam). At this juncture, at least temporarily, investors who…

While buying the house in early 2019 I consulted Woz portal and saw that the price (of the house I was planning to buy) had increased 300% over ~8 year period. A constant lunch table discussion used to be how crazy housing prices were even back in 2018-19. So the market was already hot even before the pandemic, but now it's reached mania levels!

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#138

Post by dogma1138 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

nmca wrote: post #42

In the long term, the ethically right answer seems pretty clearly to me to be a land value tax [0]. But due to encouragement of home ownership [1], that's not going to democratically tenable in a lot of countries for 20+ years. Unfortunate situation. [0] In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George,…

LTV won’t work in the UK land ownership is way too concentrated and leaseholds give land owners an easy tool to transfer the cost to the leaseholders.

London and other metropolitan areas still have a lot of low income housing in very high value areas, there are current/former council houses in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea for example that sit on land worth billions.

LVT in the UK would likely just increase cost of ownership for leaseholders which would make flats in cities even more expensive (and since many newly developed terraced, detached and townhouses also come as leasehold these days even buying a house won’t help) and just push for further gentrification as housing like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallfield_Estate would become economically non-viable.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#139

Post by Pet_Ant » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

zeepthee wrote: post #125

thepangolino wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a land value tax encourage urban sprawling ? Current ubran policies in the western world, coupled with the normalization of remote working already do this to some extent.

How would it encourage urban sprawling?

Preosumably the closer to the city centre the higher the per square fot value so to minimise costs you move to the edge of town, thus sprawl.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#140

Post by mordae » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

___luigi wrote: post #54

dmje wrote: post #25

Amen to this. Two case studies from the UK I've been thinking about recently: 1) Visiting London and spending time in South Kensington - walking back to hotel at night, only about 30% of houses had any lights on. Suggestion is the others are effectively uninhabited, and a search on RightMove shows properties sell for £20-£30m for a 4/5 bed. This isn't normal Londoners, it's outside investment. 2) Cornwall, where I li…

> walking back to hotel at night, only about 30% of houses had any lights on. I wish a data scientist at utilities (water, electricity and gas) providers pick up this line and provide some statistics on this. I wish also that city-services companies (e.g. Electricity/water/parking service provider) can collaborate to provide better and justified policy making. I did similar studies based on open data to provide insig…

Pirates tried to investigate the situation from this angle only to be publicly shamed for being commies, spying on people. They only wanted district aggregate statistics.