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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

#521
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice, but I think that increased tax will just be passed down as higher rent.

Higher rent means more people will opt to buy. That's not necessarily a bad thing in perspective. Assuming the other side effect is a decrease in costs due to a lower profit margin.

More people opting to buy means house prices go up.

There's no free lunch. The more friction, taxation, and tariffs you add to the housing market, the higher prices go for both renters and home purchasers.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do create supply and maintain housing. Clearly you have never interacted with most land lords

Back when I was a renter mine just created slums and maintained misery, but maybe he was special.

I've had slumlord landlords, landlords who maintained and kept up the property and focused on retaining tenants over increasing rents, and corporate landlords with prices set by a computer. Landlords are a spectrum.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends where you are https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow... |“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.

"Corporations" is meaningless in this context. If you want to own a rental home in the US, you should set up an LLC, both for liability reasons and because it makes it easier to deal with taxes and expenses. In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy /…

This suggests that a single-family home is generally a bad investment. Maybe not if you're living in the house yourself (no renter-landlord inefficiency), but still idk. Could make more sense in certain areas where all the value is in the land.

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

#525

How about stopping all non-occupants from buying properties.

I don’t want to purchase property, so where do I live?

Apartments, sorry I should have been more clear - all SFH should be owner-occupied

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the best part of this legislation will be that people will realize it's not institutional investors that are driving up home prices. No, that's far too optimistic.

When this doesn't make anything better, the conclusion won't be that it was a bad idea but that it somehow didn't go far enough.

Home affordability is getting better anyways, which is great, because we are finally having a surge in new & denser home building in popular regions and there mortgage rates are more reasonable than they were in the COVID-era.

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

#527
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"From" other countries is overly broad and I assume not what you intended. I am actually interested though in the idea of legislating how frequently home owners have to actually be within range of the home, for example. A friend has had a hell of a time with a landlord in Malaysia who's never seen the property.

They do it by citizenship, and you might be surprised how many investment properties are vacant homes, but I’m not necessarily advocating for this in any case. The real cure would just be right to build laws. The problem is, you can’t do that at the federal level, and the people who vote at the local level are the homeowners who benefit from housing restrictions. The federal government has a very difficult task. They…

Could homeowners be convinced with truckloads of money? As in, yes if you increase density beyond demand the value of each individual home decreases, but the value of the land dramatically increases if suddenly your single family home with a lawn could be converted to a 9 story tower renting out units to 20+ households with infrastructure spending diverted to your area to improve it. Are landowners unaware or just do not care about the profit potential?

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

#528
post #165

It will make very little difference in the end. Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities. If you want housing to be…

It's a good start. Would be nice to add a gradually increasing tax on multiple home purchases, e.g. buying a third home has a 5% tax, 4th 15% tax, fifth 25%, and if you want a sixth home you have to build it yourself. Would prevent regular people from buying up dozens of homes to rent.

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

#530
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. Let's ignore property management for now and focus on landlords (i.e. people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job. Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking.

> people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job.

Why are you thinking of it as a job? Is putting money into the stock market a job? Owning property to rent out isn't a job, and that's perfectly fine. People make money off non-jobs all the time.

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