Earlier quoted context omitted.
I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the enti…
Property taxes are directly and immediately translate into higher rent. Making rent more expensive doesn't make ownership cheaper, just makes it more attractive relative to renting.
US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the enti…
Opportunity cost means makes purchasing with a mortgage wiser than buying cash. $1000/month more for a few years is nothing compared to the property value increase of a $1M property
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
All housing is investment due to the way it's owned, regardless of who owns it. For most people, it's by far their biggest investment, resulting in extreme political activity. We must confront that fact, or negate it, for example by taxing away the investment opportunity. Investors buy housing to rent it out to others, that's the investment. People who own their own home implicitly pay themselves rent, by choosing to…
Isn't that circular reasoning? Charging rent means its an investment, but also just living in a home is "paying yourself". Is there any way to live on a property that isn't an investment (I suppose just staying there while the government owns it?).
It's not circular it just is, under our ownership scheme. Adding a 100% land value tax does remove the investment characteristic, though, as it removes the speculative aspect of land, and in fact drives the price of land to $0.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#304The 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…
While that’s true, even if “Wall Street” is only holding a few percent of homes, those being released to the markets (and future ones not being purchased) might help. Corporate entity creation in America is such that I don’t think this will be enforceable (“we don’t buy homes, our Gibraltar office’s subsidiary invested in its CEO’s LLC that bought the home”) but if I’m wrong, it could help somewhat. It’s binary think…
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been told that, for privacy reasons, you should even buy your own home under an LLC as well
Depends on how unique your legal name is. Buying your own home as an individual creates a public record with your address and your name. This gets ingested by lots of people search websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ (which I have used). But if your legal name is really common, it would be harder for anyone else to deduce which one is actually you.
I'm not saying that site isn't potentially useful as a starting point to find out some stuff, but it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.
(edited to add): It also says there's no public record of me being married, which definitely is not the case. My wife literally co-owns and also lives in the house it lists me as living in (and has the correct purchase date for it), so you'd think that whatever algorithm is used to build the dataset would be smart enough to see if there's any other ways we're legally tied together. It also says it doesn't have any records of business associations I have when last year I registered a single-member LLC for contract work last year. The LLC literally has the same name as me followed by " LLC", because apparently no one else had registered that before in my state, which at least gives some evidence that my name isn't overwhelmingly common.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#306Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opportunity cost means makes purchasing with a mortgage wiser than buying cash. $1000/month more for a few years is nothing compared to the property value increase of a $1M property
Where I live, condo's do not increase in value much due to HOA fees and taxes. I just plugged in some numbers using (estimated) purchase price, taxes, HOA for the unit I'm in now, and it would cost me a little over $1M over 30 years to own a $300,000 1br apt.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.
Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the enti…
> Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes. Suppose you had $100,000 in cash, and buy a house for $100,000. You'll not be paying 5% interest on a mortgage. But if you did not buy the house, you would be investing that $100,000 for a 5% return. So, you're either paying 5% on the mortgage, or foregoing 5% return for investing that money. The rich person is not getting a di…
Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Maybe they should clamp down on that as well, especially individuals who are only purchasing SFH in residential neighborhoods as a way to park their overseas cash.
Exactly. Nobody wants to hear this, because we're all Temporarily Embarrassed Landlords, but if a corporation buying 100 houses to sit on and extract rent is bad (or good), then 100 individuals each buying 1 house to sit on and extract rent must be equally bad (or good).