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How private equity is changing housing

theatlantic.com

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Re: How private equity is changing housing

#241
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many states, there's a homestead exemption on property taxes that doesn't apply to non-owner occupied properties, so the opposite is true. Also, I don't know what you mean about rolling paper losses into the next deal, but I suspect it's not accurate either. There's a reason this non-existent loophole wasn't mentioned in the article that was looking for reasons to hate on corporate landlords.

Capital loss carryover is possibly what they were referring to Unrelated note but the Homestead exemption in Santa Clara County, average sale price $2,300,000, is $7,000. To be explicit, the home’s value is reduced by $7,000 for valuation purposes. Edit: the tax deferred part sounds like a 1031 exchange

You might be right about the 1031 exchange, but that has almost nothing to do with property taxes.

The homestead exemptions are very small or non-existent in some states, but I believe they are fairly substantial in the south. Ultimately, my point was that they are completely wrong in that I don't know of a single locality where landlords are given discounts on property taxes but owner occupied homes have to pay full freight, but the opposite is true in at least some cases. They could be talking about developer incentives for new construction, but that's not the same thing IMO and it's difficult to understand what they meant.

It's very, very hard to talk to people who have such strong, completely uninformed opinions and seem to be completely unwilling to even attempt to educate themselves on the topic. To be clear, this is not pointed at you, I'm just not willing to invest the time you did to seriously guess at what the parent poster was going on about.

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#242
post #18

One of the issues the article doesn't mention is that these houses are effectively cheaper to purchase for corporate owners. Generally they can borrow money at a lower rate, but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant. Effectively they are redirecting money that would be paid in taxes into the payments on the new purchase.

This^, this is how you end up with serfdom

Ah yes, the down votes have started I forgot that this is a forum for the rent seeking class

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#243

Lots of ideas in here that fail to properly identify and address the root cause, which is disappointing given how many of us are programmers. Trace the problem back. Where does it start? Why is PE investing in homes? Because they can make money. Why does buying a home make money? Because the value appreciates. Why does the value appreciate on an asset that literally deteriorates over time? Because of restricted suppl…

Usually a root-cause analysis asks for five why's so your analysis seems a bit short. One should ask why it is that housing / land is more profitable than those investments in which banks and private equity previously invested. And then when you follow that line of reasoning (too much capital and credit -- thanks quantitative easing! -- poor performance on bonds due to low interest rates and restrictions on the quali…

That there may be "too much capital and credit" is a red herring because investors won't pour money into assets that aren't lucrative. The main reason housing has been so lucrative is because there's more demand than supply, so building more housing what needs to happen!

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's interesting how "shortage" is defined across different products. From an economics standpoint, "shortage" isn't a useful word, unless it's applied in the extremely unlikely scenario where there nothing is available at any price. Generally, this is because price dictates supply. "Shortage" for the current housing market is generally used to mean, "relative to historic trends, many people want houses who c…

Shortage in the absence of price controls generally means that something is inhibiting supply from increasing as demand does, causing increased demand to have the primary result of increasing prices rather than increasing production. Sometimes this is expected or unavoidable, e.g. if you have a sudden increase in the demand for electricity then the price will increase temporarily until new power generation or transmi…

Shortage is almost always used with a hidden assumption that the current price is "bad."

Truckers are currently retiring faster than they're being replaced. So some folks are saying there's going to be a "trucker shortage." In reality, there are plenty of people out there who could get a CDL license and drive a truck, but don't. Why? Because the compensation for being a trucker isn't high enough because the demand isn't high enough.

For housing, from the house seller's point of view, they could have the viewpoint that there are far too many houses for sale, the supply is too high, they want a higher price for their house. And from the buyer's point of view, there aren't enough houses because they want to pay a lower price.

I'm not saying either side is right/wrong or good/bad. It's just that "shortage" isn't a very useful word.

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#245
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a non-ruthless corporation? How do you test that? What about the fact that most homeowners get the vast majority of the money for said purchase from a (presumably ruthless) corporation?

No such thing as a non-ruthless corporation, it is inherent with the legal structure.

I think it hasn't clicked with you that you're effectively advocating for the end of all renting.

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all what the GP said. They aren't saying landlords are the problem, they are saying Institutional Investors and Foreign Corporations being landlords are the problem.

Wait, you're not answering his question. "Institutional investors" rent out houses at a scale individual owners can't, and have more resources to maintain those properties and respond to renter complaints. Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?

>Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?

Is there a good example of this?

Every corporation I've rented from have all fought me tooth and nail when I needed maintenance and did basically everything possible to ignore any and all complaints (because it costs them money, obviously). I have had to have a lawyer send a letter on my behalf more than once.

But that's just my experience, which has jaded me. Perhaps you can show me a non-hypothetical example of the other side and open my eyes up a bit? Any countries, laws, specific corporations which demonstrate a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders I should look at?

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you're not answering his question. "Institutional investors" rent out houses at a scale individual owners can't, and have more resources to maintain those properties and respond to renter complaints. Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?

> Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing? Is there a good example of this? Every corporation I've rented from have all fought me tooth and nail when I needed maintenance and did basically everything possible to ignore any and all complaints (because it costs them money, obviously). I have had to have a lawyer send a letter on my behalf more than once. But that'…

It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners!

Anyways, I was just calling out that your logic didn't appear to hold. The right response to the comment that roots this subthread is "institutional landlords are not generally a thing". Again: the median number of properties a California corporate landlord lets out is 1.

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing? Is there a good example of this? Every corporation I've rented from have all fought me tooth and nail when I needed maintenance and did basically everything possible to ignore any and all complaints (because it costs them money, obviously). I have had to have a lawyer send a letter on my behalf more than once. But that'…

It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners! Anyways, I was just calling out that your logic didn't appear to hold. The right response to the comment that roots this subthread is "institutional landlords are not generally a thing". Again: the median number of properties a California corporate landlord lets out is 1.

>your logic

I didn't write any other comment here :)

But, anyways:

>It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners!

My experience has been different than yours, in that case!

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all what the GP said. They aren't saying landlords are the problem, they are saying Institutional Investors and Foreign Corporations being landlords are the problem.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with institutional investors buying tract homes and renting them out. Nothing! It brings the benefits of living in such homes to people who otherwise would be excluded from them by the financial credit system.

Well really I was just trying to explain the GP's post, not adopt their views, but I think I can play devil's advocate here for the sake of discussion.

The problem with institutional investors is that in making it big business you drive up home prices which in turn drives up the rental prices. Since they can have a wide portfolio of homes, they are less likely to lower rent prices when demand drops, because they can afford to take the short term hit if it they think the market is going to pick back up again. AND they can play games like grabbing all available homes in an area in order to artificially inflate prices.

Re: How private equity is changing housing

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners! Anyways, I was just calling out that your logic didn't appear to hold. The right response to the comment that roots this subthread is "institutional landlords are not generally a thing". Again: the median number of properties a California corporate landlord lets out is 1.

> your logic I didn't write any other comment here :) But, anyways: > It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners! My experience has been different than yours, in that case!

Must be. In particular: the only landlord I ever got a security deposit back from automatically was a corporate landlord.

More broadly: if your concern is that the landlord isn't going to fix the furnace or whatever, you can address that without distorting the market just by creating causes of action, penalties, and fix-and-deduct ordinances to shift incentives.

Banning corporate landlords reduces the supply of housing (larger institutional investors are the primary builders of dense multifamily), and privileges individual owner/landlords who do not have a better track record or better incentives or better resources.

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