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

reuters.com

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

#471

Post by jimbob45 »

roywiggins wrote: post #162
jay_kyburz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, It should be expanded that no company can own residential property, and more importantly, each person can only own one property. People should go find something else to invest their savings in.

Would that not make rental properties entirely illegal? That seems... complicated

Rental single-family homes should largely be illegal. Short-term housing should be largely limited to apartment buildings and more space-economic structures. Littering the landscape with empty houses only helps bank accounts.

Still, I'm more than cognizant that there must be huge exceptions carved out for any of these ideas.

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

#472

Post by dheera »

kiba wrote: post #334
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.

Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country. IF you want affordability? Tax land. Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wa…

No. If you want affordability, make the government efficient and tax people LESS.

The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax.

This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.

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

#473

Post by psunavy03 »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #97
JoshTriplett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses. > Universities typically own housing as well. I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

> critical subsets of uses I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.

So basically you're subtly encouraging violence and intimidation, and want that to be easier than trying to find someone's "anonymous mansion."

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

#475

Post by caditinpiscinam »

idiotsecant wrote: post #361
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 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 t…

> A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system

I'm not sure this is true. Based on a couple articles I found, this is what the current situation looks like in USA:

a) Billionaires, (of whom there are about 1,000) own about 5% of the wealth

b) Millionaires, (of whom there are about 25 million, or 7% of the population, excluding billionaires) own about 74% of the wealth

This tracks with my impression of the rental market. Most rent money isn't going to the billionaires or big corporations, it's going to the 10 million or so mom-and-pop rental property owners.

I'm not an expert on this stuff by any means, but my intuition is that it's a cycle, wherein the rental system is one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality in the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentrat...

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

#477

Post by nospice »

saghm wrote: post #305
kccqzy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, I just searched that site you linked with my name and the zip code I lived in for the first 18 years of my life, and it seems to have a pretty muddled view of who I am. It has my correct age, full legal name, and current address, as well as two of my past apartments and my address for those 18 years where I lived in the zip code I searched, but it also lists my parents current home that they boug…

> it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.

Until you have a stalker who will harass you, your parents, siblings, grandparents... and that stuff isn't all that uncommon.

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

#478

Post by tptacek »

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…

You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't.

I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman that can be dispelled to solve the affordability problem without painstakingly goring people's oxes state-by-state and municipality-by-municipality. But it's a fantasy.

If you can tell this story in simple step-by-step form, you will. I think you could tell a story about how a large corporate buyer clears out all the marginal buyers for some thin market like an individual subdivision or tranche of new construction housing in the Sun Belt. But I don't think you can tell a realistic story for them being "a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices" across the whole market. I look forward to seeing your attempt, though.

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

#479

Post by CPLX »

orangecat wrote: post #449
CPLX wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely, violently, incorrect. Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building ) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.

Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. Building more housing is the opposite of a problem.

It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal.

In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.

The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.

We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.

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