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If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

wsj.com

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Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#451

Post by tjr225 »

plank_time wrote: post #258
throw737858 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who owns a house in cali is a milionaire. I am not sure it applies to immigrant who just moved to California.

The old person would have sold the house a long time ago because of the rise of their property tax. They wouldn’t be millionaires. They would have to sell their home for a small gain and then rent for the rest of their lives. And since they are old they have no income so they need to keep moving to cheaper and cheaper apartments. Sounds like a great way to live a life, just because younger people feel like they deser…

All people deserve to be housed.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#452

Post by mywittyname »

adflux wrote: post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

I doubt they are getting mortgages on these properties if they are overpaying the half.

More likely is that they have no where else to part their money anymore.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#453

Post by pzh »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #334
GloriousKoji wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 is a limits how much property tax can increase in a year. So hypothetically without prop 13 it would possible that the value of your house jumps 10x and then you're stuck with paying 10x the amount of property tax that year. I don't think we need to remove it completely but some adjustments like applicable only to a primary residence and not investment or commercial properties would probably go a long way.

If the value of my home jumped 10x in a year, I would be ecstatic. Are you kidding?

If the value then drops 10x, you won’t get your property tax refunded. If prices end up going up and down like bitcoin, you’d need to have some protection.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#454

Post by gfodor »

lolc wrote: post #432
gfodor wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the times it is exhausting is when I've been overly attached to my own beliefs such that there's an emotional response to being exposed to claims in conflict to them. The best way to overcome this inhibitor to open mindedness in my opinion is to just ensure you have a broad exposure such that it becomes normal and unimpactful to read many things you strongly disagree with regularly.

While I agree that it's healthy to keep a broad set of sources, I find that once a source has shown to be untrustworthy on some topic, I discount them on other topics too. There is a difference between having a certain worldview and twisting facts to your narrative. Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Republican party in the U.S. is happily ignoring facts around the last presidential election. There is little use in e…

These people you mention aren’t generating these theories nor am I suggesting we take their conclusions into consideration - my point is they have value as relays which are connected to networks you otherwise would not have access to, and as alternative relevancy ranking algorithms over the set of published information. For example, this WSJ article gets an increased weight in being exposed to me as a side effect of not masking out this person who is promoting it based upon their own, more widely scoped, conspiracy theory.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#455

Post by nradov »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #214
JKCalhoun wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years How I know you don't live in California. You would love Prop 13 then that has capped the amount that property taxes can increase per year. Be careful though, your public schools and other services paid for by property taxes are going to suffer as the cash flow dries up....

Strange argument considering public schools (and in general _many_ public services) in CA are in terrible condition. Maybe I'm missing the point though.

CA school funding per student is above the national median. If some schools are in terrible condition then it's due to incompetent management, not lack of funding. Conditions in my local CA public schools seem reasonably good.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#456

Post by s_dev »

FredPret wrote: post #366
matthoiland wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody works but the vacant lot. I paid $3600 for this lot and will hold 'till I get $6000. The profit is unearned increment made possible by the presence of this community and enterprise of its people. I take the profit without earning it. for the remedy read Henry George. - Billboard posted in an empty lot, Rockford Illinois, 1914

That's a common meme - that asset appreciation is unearned wealth. But it's not. That investor could've spent the 3600 on hookers and blackjack. Investors freezing their money in communities in the form of real estate or other investment is a key part of those communites becoming richer and more complex. There's a real risk of losing your money - there's no worse financial nightmare than holding real estate that you'…

>that asset appreciation is unearned wealth

I'm sure we can agree the vacant lot never improved itself. It's not unearned -- it's earned by the surrounding community improving things -- which make that lot more attractive.

The incentives don't align. If that community was to massively regress e.g. unfavorable rezoning -- the value of that lot would plummet.

However in this case it's likely to be partially addressed by paying land value taxes which disincentivizes leaving it vacant -- what Henry George was getting at and wasn't there at the time.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#457

Post by notJim »

spamizbad wrote: post #153
adflux wrote: post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

The root cause here isn't really the Fed. We've been under-building housing since 1990, back when rates were 5-8%. If you track new housing starts against adult population, you'll see some pretty terrible things. Granted this is lower than rates were in the 1980s. But if the answer here is you need to keep rates at 10-15% to build sufficient housing I don't see how that's politically tenable.

Low rates are effectively a demand-side subsidy for housing I think, similar to other policies. But as you point out, if you restrict the supply-side, demand-side subsidy can be counter-productive.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#458

Post by TheCowboy »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #283
TheCowboy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People using "The Great Reset" as a pejorative tend to have their views deeply rooted in right-leaning garbage conspiracy theories. Surely there's a better source for what Black Rock is doing than this person's Twitter thread. > Only the worlds largest asset manager and the leading proponent of The Great Reset. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402437638423035906

Uh, have you listened to their podcast? [0] The discussion of the great reset is not rooted in conspiracy theories, but rather direct quotations uttered by extremely problematic individuals who have a broad history of sketchiness, corruption, and warmongering. I take strong issue with your careful labeling of those with whom you disagree as all leaning in one direction politically. [0] https://pod.link/1517364006

The Great Reset is predominantly used by conspiracy Twitter and it isn't close. It is blown out of proportion relative to its original context, and amounts to sloppy punditry trying overfit an interpretation of the world. One of its least helpful usages is as a weapon against debate/policies that attempt to address collective action problems such as climate change.

It kind of reminds me of what was done with "New World Order", which people seem to be moving on from since the conspiracy pundit predictions haven't been realized (e.g. no world authoritarian government yet).

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#459

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #207
stagger87 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think people should be able to buy affordable homes? Isn't affordability affected when you are competing with companies with deep pockets? When those companies need ROI do you think they will prioritize housing affordability over profitability?

I'm not sure how much I care about whether people own or rent. The politics of the place I live are controlled by owners and are renter-hostile; I don't think increasing the rental stock is a bad thing, and am inclined to believe --- without making any value judgement about REITs and Blackrock ---- that it's probably a net positive. The compulsion to own homes and tie people's finances to the real estate market is a…

[deleted]

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#460

Post by FredPret »

wolverine876 wrote: post #380
FredPret wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a common meme - that asset appreciation is unearned wealth. But it's not. That investor could've spent the 3600 on hookers and blackjack. Investors freezing their money in communities in the form of real estate or other investment is a key part of those communites becoming richer and more complex. There's a real risk of losing your money - there's no worse financial nightmare than holding real estate that you'…

How did the investor in that empty lot make the community richer?

Speculative investment without asset improvements like that is the worst kind, but it still serves to stabilize prices for other investors. At worst, the speculator loses their shirt and a more capable capital allocator gets to work with the money.
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