So investors buy the homes then rent them out? What’s the problem? In some asian markets investors buy homes then sit on them unused for years. That’s a problem.
The problem is that it gets harder and harder for normal people to own anything (build up wealth), while building wealth is the best retirement startegy there is. I myself, for example, live in a city where owning the place I live in is just barely getting in reach for me, although I am in the top 30% income bracket of my country. I therefore have to put my savings into the stock market, which is at an all time high.…
Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
531–540 of 598 posts
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#532So investors buy the homes then rent them out? What’s the problem? In some asian markets investors buy homes then sit on them unused for years. That’s a problem.
It affects the housing market very negatively. These are houses that could've been bought by families and couples and so on. Instead of being available for purchase, the same people have now have to rent instead of buy. House prices rise, rent increases, common folk are struggling, investors are getting rich without doing anything. It's just meh all over.
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose the implied question is: who's going to rent to students if the landlords' investments get penalized for them not living there themselves. There's presumably too many students in these cities for all of them to find some family who have a spare room to rent.
Even if this action were to have unintended consequences, the question was "do they want to". No, they don't, obviously, not any more that the people who gave "go" to STS-51L wanted to kill seven astronauts. What they want to do is to get rid of predatory investors.
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making use of any scarce resource intended for the poor, while you're rich, because it's so scarce, is beyond backwards... I have trouble being generous and playing devil's advocate because I simply can't see the argument you're making.
OK, I worded that very badly. I'm not using it because they're scarce. I mean to say: The reason someone could say I'm "abusing" it, is because they're scarce. They shouldn't be scarce, and they're not intended for just poor people. To be clear, I'm not here for financial reasons. In fact, I would not object to paying more, if it meant putting more in the pot for poorer households to benefit from.
The tax your landlord will pay on their profits, once you move out to a market-priced property, will be adding to the pot for poorer households to benefit from.
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sold on the Economist article. I do believe in home ownership. The idea that a person spends a lifetime in the same home and community is a good one. We're tribal creatures, and you want a tribe -- you want people to know their neighbors, have community BBQs, and live in real communities. You want enough of a vested interest in municipal politics that democratic structures work. You want kids growing up with…
Unfortunately “community barbecues” oftentimes meant “barbecues with people who are exactly like me and who think exactly like I do”, an attitude which has had a pretty corrosive effect on democracy in the near past.
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#536In the long term, the ethically right answer seems pretty clearly to me to be a land value tax [0]. But due to encouragement of home ownership [1], that's not going to democratically tenable in a lot of countries for 20+ years. Unfortunate situation. [0] In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George,…
Land ownership tax doesn't work because land is a basic need. You have to exist somewhere. The problem isn't ownership of land, it's excessive ownership of land. Ownership of land beyond need into greed. You can easily design land ownership tax like income tax where people who own more pay more. People who own enough for their family are not taxed at all and if you want more you pay a lot more. Of course there is the…
For example one way it aligns incentives is pressuring land to be put to more productive use. Aka if someone can’t afford the taxes they might have to sell it to someone who can and likely that second entity will build more units on the land which utilizes the land more efficiently. Not in every instance perhaps but enough to matter. Its a way of forcing communally central land to be put to good use and for the profitability to feed back into the community.
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#537Governments are printing money, inflation is eating savings. Properties are safe and easy way to protect money. When buying properties will be banned, what would you recommend as an alternative?
Gold and guns
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet they pay substantially better wages with better benefits on average. Even labor law compliance is much better (not to mention that small businesses are exempt from many regulations in the first place).
Not sure about that. The benefits are better and more structured and there are multitudes of articles about how they are much much harder to access, leaving most workers partially dependent on state benefits
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a dead comment later in this thread which using directed abusive language towards another commenter while linking to a Louis Rossmann video. The video [1] was interesting, although the dead comment seemed to completely ignore the video's [1] main point, where Louis talks about a hypothesis [2] where in New York City there may be an incentive structure between real estate investors and banks which is creating…
> The hypothesis speculates that, if a building's assessed value is lowered, it could trigger conditions in loan contracts that penalize the landlord or investor. This is the issue exactly. A commercial mortgage lender will insist on a certain maximum Loan-to-Value ratio. The value of the property is directly related to the long-term income that it generates (i.e., the net present value of all future cash flows). If…
Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who’s getting tossed out of homes? If they own any part of it, they can sell their land at its new higher value and pocket their share of the gains. Then the can either move into a nearby newly redeveloped multi-unit building (increased efficiency as incentivized by LVT) or they can move further out to land with the same low value on which they used to live in a detached home. This same type of thinking drives me cra…
You just described someone forced out of their home.
1) The buyer is pricing the house at its worth minus its future tax liabilities (which is what the seller receives), and the seller will use that money to purchase another house which also has tax liabilities. That house has to be worse, or the tax liabilities lower (or in the same general tax area, both.)
2) The seller is in an appreciating asset, but can't choose when to sell. They must sell when the tax liabilities become too much[*]. Meaning they must regardless of whether the property will probably continue to appreciate. This is a wealthy buyer's advantage over the seller, although this is partially ameliorated by competition between wealthy buyers who have priced in likely appreciation. But a very wealthy buyer can create appreciation through buying nearby properties to control the area, and through lobbying.
3) Also, real estate tax law tends to benefit wealthy buyers who leave rental properties empty, and can use those liabilities to offset profits they make in another area.
This seems like a formula for downward mobility. And for people to be forced out of the neighborhoods where they have networks and jobs, and have to move to worse places where they have no networks, and are farther from jobs.
[*] In the worst case, they mortgage the home in order to pay the tax liabilities, and to extend the time before they must sell - meaning that when they sell, they're actually paying off back taxes with the money, meaning they have even less (or no) money for their next residence.