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Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

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Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#401
We've inadvertently created substantial cost advantages for REITS:

* Assuming that they never sell, they never pay capital gains taxes. Meanwhile, if I move and sell, I get hit now. * Ability to cross-collateralize a bunch of houses lets you tap into institutional capital. No pesky appraisal fees, no payoff for a mortgage broker, etc. Result is that their cost of capital is way below an individual's. * Better management -- ability to hire a bunch of actual skilled handymen to work across multiple properties means that they have specialization/ gains from scale. Typical homeowner is a jack of all trades who has to hire specialized talent which is vastly more expensive. * lots of pricing data with which to price as optimistically as possible. * ability to write off expenses

So basically, tax regime changes have created the rise of the REIT.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#402
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They are treating their home primarily as an investment because that is what they have been told to do their whole life." It's not some psyop that has duped an entire nation, it's people accurately recognizing that their home is the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life, it's almost completely done with debt, and most don't want to end up underwater.

> it's people accurately recognizing that their home is the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life, it's almost completely done with debt, and most don't want to end up underwater. What is those people's second biggest purchase which is also usually done with debt? Does anyone believe that the government should enact policies to ensure that car prices always increase so they would be a better investment?…

The goal should probably be something close to price stability. If prices bounce all around, up and down, people pay more attention than if they were just kind of 'there', and you could buy or sell whenever the need arose in order to move into housing that better suits you at a given point in your life.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what to tell you. I just don't want to be surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. I didn't buy a nice house in a nice suburb to stare at giant cement buildings. It's that simple.

You're building a straw man. The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure, investors won't want to build a 30 stories building. But they might want to build a 3-4 units building, something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY densification is impossible. You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see giant cement buildings. But you do see liv…

I'm not building a strawman at all. Let me make my position even more clear: I don't want to live near multi-family housing. I want it to remain illegal for it to be built near me.

Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people infect with your ideas turns to hell.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#405
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems everyone that bought a home for anything other than living in it. In the article they even mention: > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups. So most of the percentage increase is done by mom-and-pop investors rather…

>I get the hate against institutional investors going in and buying up entire neighborhoods. But the sentiment that we should just abolish landlords is rather dumb IMO. There's a massive gap between someone being able to afford $1200 in rent and being able to afford a home with all of the added costs. As opposed to... being able to afford the rent with the same added costs? Take my area for example: rent in my neighb…

> So what are the added costs that landlords are "saving" renters from?

Utilities will generally cost a bit more. But the real killers with home ownership tend to be large expenses that come due all at once. Roof needs to be replaced, AC unit needs to be replaced, major appliance replacement, foundation problems, any number of expensive things can and will come up.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just need to remember that banning housing investment means banning rentals which is problematic for people who don't have good credit and a down payment.

IMHO cities need to limit how many large multi-national conglomerates are allowed to build huge rental complexes. A large % of the high density housing being built around Seattle is rental only, all that does is funnel money out of the city. Residents don't get to build equity, and rental prices keep going up year over year, vs mortgage payments that, except for the property tax portion, stay the same over 30 years.…

When they don't come in and build out those large rental complexes those very well paid engineers rent/buy every SFH for miles causing the absolutely insane gentrification we've seen in San Francisco that pushes everyone out.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems everyone that bought a home for anything other than living in it. In the article they even mention: > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups. So most of the percentage increase is done by mom-and-pop investors rather…

> There's a massive gap between someone being able to afford $1200 in rent and being able to afford a home with all of the added costs. Having recently bought a home, I think there isn't so much of a gap and in many cases the gap is inverted: it's cheaper to buy than to rent.

Key phrase here being “recently bought.” Get back to us after you’ve had to replace the roof, had a water main burst, or something of that nature that requires you to cough up $10K+ all at once. The mortgage is the _minimum_ monthly payment, not the maximum.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking nits, but Parkersburg is in West Virginia, not Ohio (source: born there).

Ah sorry about that! I was just picking a random spot in Ohio that was kinda nearish the Great Lakes. I guess I moved to Far East. Did you like it there?

We moved when I was about two weeks old, but a lot of my family is in that area (on both sides of the river). The area is struggling economically, but it has some historical and scenic charm.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#409

Key piece of information from the article: > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups. So the mega investors only make up 3% of that 25%. I'd love to see data on what the remaining 22% are, but my guess is: * flippers * midd…

Don't forget the "kilo" investors, who may only own a few dozen or hundreds of homes ;)

Being curious about what those numbers actually look like, I found a CoreLogic report[1] from earlier this year which states:

> Figure 3 shows different investor classes have maintained their shares through Q1 2022. Small investors (those who own fewer than 10 properties) were responsible for nearly half (48%) of all investor purchases during the first quarter of the year. Medium investors (those with 11 – 100 properties) purchased 31% of investor properties, large investors (those with 101 – 1,000 properties) accounted for 9% of home purchases and mega investors (those with over 1,000 properties) represented 12% of all purchases.

So it sounds like roughly half of investor purchases (not quite that) are from those owning at most 10 properties. Would be interesting to see how well these numbers extrapolate out over time; from this limited Q1 perspective it sounds like the majority of purchases are by medium/large/mega investors.

[1] https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/single-family-investo...

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty does cause some problems." What differs between it being concentrated or spread out? I see you're making the argument that it should be spread out, but I don't see any explaination of the benefits. Edit: why disagree? This is an honest question.

Forcing poor people into rich areas will make them stop being poor. Or so I've gathered.

It just makes the rich people move away. We call it blight, white flight, and gentrification as it cycles around.
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