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

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

#51
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…

> Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years.

Most people pay for housing by monthly payments, making the nominal value of the house irrelevant if the monthly payment stays the same. Further, you should consider the home owner's "basket of goods" to include the hypothetical rent they'd be paying for an equivalent house. Their mortgage payments and home ownership are then more like taking a loan to buy a fixed-income asset that gets renegotiated annually. A home owner who lives in their home is both a landlord and a tenant.

I'm not a home-owner, and I don't feel shafted. My stock market holdings have kept pace or done better than if I'd purchased a house.

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

#52
post #47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried 1 in most places? No lot availability. No materials to build the house. No workers available to build the house. Etc.

Then the problem is NOT "Blackrock buying homes". It's elsewhere.

The problem is that Blackrock is taking advantage of "free money" to get in on this arbitrage while it can, while normal people don't have anywhere close to the same opportunities to take advantage of "free money". Naturally, Banks eat up all land and houses, and then "you will own nothing and be happy", as per WEF.

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

#53
post #26

I really wish we'd get some innovation in the housing market. 3D printing of houses or something could be epic. "Just" disrupt the current construction companies... It's clear they can't keep up with the demand right now.

Isn't prefab a thing in the US? I have a hunch 3D printing won't solve the issue since you need not just walls, but plumbing, electricity, windows, doors, etc. Then again, imagine Blackrock or someone else just starts buying land. You're screwed anyway.

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

#54

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

Once you can't afford to pay the GOVERNMENT any more because property taxes have skyrocketed out of control I'm sure a private company will be happy to swoop in and buy your house out from under you.

So you’d rather have an inefficient use of property that sits languishing just because some one owned it in the past? One of the benefits of taxing property is that it encourages productive use. Use it or lose it. The increasing velocity of property transfers helps increase economic activity.

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

#55

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

This totally depends on the jurisdiction. In NYS, your taxing authority (town, school district) has some levy that is approved. Your share of the levy is roughly your property's assessed value divided by the total assessed value of properties in that taxing jurisdiction. There are some complicating factors like when a taxing authority like a school district spans multiple assessing authorities (like a town/city); but the basic concept is sound.

I was very surprised when I learned other places charge you some fixed fraction of the property value; and as that value goes up the budget of the municipality goes up.

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

#56

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

That's almost never a worry that plays out. Property taxes are usually a levy, allocated prorata based on total assessed value.

If your taxes are going up dramatically as values rise, that's either a sign of issues with equalization rates (the county/town/city needs to periodically reassess), or that other areas in the jurisdiction are declining relative to value. You often see that in cities where property values often mirrors the old "redline" maps... gentrification gets you million dollar condos, but two blocks away some tenement is declining in relative value.

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

#57
post #37
post #24

Sidestepping all the emotional comments. It's open market. Adopt to it. 1. Build more homes. 2. Sell to Blackrock or whatever at 2x or 3x your cost. 3. Profit!

Have you tried 1 in most places? No lot availability. No materials to build the house. No workers available to build the house. Etc.

Add in zoning and NIMBYs and getting anything built is a nightmare.

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

#59
post #43

Its worse than that. As a tenant, you cannot have people who are not on the lease stay long term without them going through a background check. This means that you may end up increasing the homelessness of relatives with temporary financial issues and also isolating potential mates with financial issues from living with their significant others until married, forcing the better financially equipped mate to take a hit…

Rent control makes landlords very hesitant to add new people to a lease. Otherwise the unit can just be passed from friend to friend and never get back to market.

> Otherwise the unit can just be passed from friend to friend and never get back to market.

I'm not sure how this is unfair. Considering the way capital gains are taxed after the sale it seems like the grandfathered-in rent controls are just a lever at the opposite end of the spectrum. But of course, we don't want to give any levers to the poors so it has to go.

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

#60

This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but…

It's a good thing that the value of your house is going up though, right? I suppose it might be upsetting to have to sell your house if it becomes too expensive, but that's a really nice problem to have imo.
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