US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by idiotsecant » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

mycodebreaks wrote: post #261

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…

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.

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause.

Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market.

The problem is when people who want to own houses can't afford them, even when they contribute meaningfully to society. The root cause of this is not landlords existing. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system, to a point that the additional wealth gives them no real benefit, but serves only to remove that wealth from the vast majority of otherwise middle class people.

If you want to fix this problem return the top tax tiers to what they were 50, 75, 100 years ago and the problem will be severely reduced. It's not sufficient to solve it, but its low hanging fruit.

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

#362

Post by impendia » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #45

JoshTriplett wrote: post #23

One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.

There has to be some nuance. Companies are known to either rent of sometimes own housing for personnel who travel to other offices. Universities typically own housing as well. So maybe it’s something like it can’t be one of the main businesses of the corp to buy up residential housing as an investment tool.

I agree in principle, but companies (and individual very rich people) are amazingly inventive when it comes to finding loopholes in the "nuance".

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

#363

Post by wiredpancake » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

runjake wrote: post #348

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 isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are. I'm pretty naive to the issue, but awhile back I took a look at property records for my neighborhood. In fact, equity firms, including BlackRock, were buying up a bunch of houses in my neighborhood. A tiny datapoint, I know. Edit: It might've been Blackstone. It's been about a year since I looked it up. Edit 2: Looking up records now , it looks like mo…

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

#364

Post by hn_acc1 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #250

oceanplexian wrote: post #195

Earlier 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).

Guaranteed those 100 individuals won't all raise their rent 10% (or whatever) on the same day, every n months.

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

#365

Post by estearum » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

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…

This is extremely silly.

Prices are high because we don't build enough houses which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, then the houses we have built are all owned by empty nesters and people with 1 - 3 investment properties.

Everything else you're describing is completely ridiculous.

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

#366

Post by empath75 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

riazrizvi wrote: post #338

This will absolutely help. It’s easy for these institutional players to downplay their involvement with select stats, to play PR defense, but platforms like Zillow work with institutional funds to sell them an information advantage that means they are at the end of the market that does the most upward impact on pricing. People don’t have a natural feel for how little you need to alter flow to cause liquidity in a sys…

Zero chance this moves housing costs an iota. Most of those wall street owned houses are rentals. If they are forced to sell them, that is a net zero change to housing supply, because they are taking a rental unit off the market.

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

#367

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #325

observationist wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. 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. The things that they do have mass…

> 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…

Define "tiny portion of the market", especially "market".

There are many houses in the US. Not all of them are for sale. There's a difference between having a "tiny portion of the market" when you define "the market" as all houses in the US, and "tiny portion of the market" when you define "the market" as the houses that are actively being bought and sold. I would not be surprised if corporate involvement was a significantly higher proportion of the latter rather than the former.

It takes a lot less to put your thumb on the scale of the "liquid" portion of a stock if it is significantly smaller in size than the total stock.

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

#368

Post by iamnothere » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #266

iamnothere wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well technically that’s true, in the same sense that the only way to roll back inflation is demand destruction (and an extended recession or depression). The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population. Halting growth in one area just displaces it. This can be a good trade if the area into which growth is displaced is underdeveloped with few other potential uses. But it can also create Atlanta or H…

> The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population. We don't need to. The population growth in the Western world is mostly over, the US will likely peak at barely +10% to the current population numbers. Europe is likely already at or near the peak number. And Tokyo managed to get a bubble within a country with a _falling_ population. Not just stagnant like in Europe, but actually numerically decreas…

Interesting theory, although I don’t know if US based remote work will continue to be as common as it is now. The policies you suggest also seem difficult politically since most environmentalists seem to want more density, not less.

If the combination of AI, declining returns on service and knowledge-based work, and national security priorities create a resurgence in manufacturing then factory towns may make a comeback.

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

#369

Post by tshaddox » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #325

observationist wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. 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. The things that they do have mass…

> 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…

I don't think that's quite what the comment is claiming. They're not saying that some small portion of homeowners are working together to raise prices. I think they're more talking about the concept of "marginal buyers." It's the marginal buyer that sets prices, not the average buyer. And particularly when supply is heavily restricted, the marginal buyers can be a very tiny portion of all buyers, and can look very different from the average buyer.

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

#370

Post by estearum » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #324

mycodebreaks wrote: post #261

Earlier 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.

This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society. IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction! N…

No, the real problem is that the vast majority of their income does not come from their role in creating supply or maintaining housing.

Proof: Propose a 100% land value tax, which definitionally only removes that part of income that is generated by the community around their property, and see if they go for it.