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Priced out of home ownership

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Priced out of home ownership

#531

Post by jmrm »

tcgv wrote: post #266
phoehne wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's the case in your location, but sometimes foreign buyers come in and buy properties they don't expect to inhabit (unless something goes really bad in their country). Europe and the US have strong rule of law systems that prevent the state from just taking property. (The government charging you with a bogus criminal charge to justify taking their property in in their home country). It's also an ass…

Portugal had a golden visa program that granted citzenship if you bought real state of at least 500k EUR. That drove home prices up signficantly in Lisbon, specailly units in that price range. Under new law, the Portuguese Golden Visa no longer provides Residency status through Real Estate investments. [1] https://www.portugalhomes.com/golden-visa-portugal

They also have to remove that "golden visa" in Spain due to the same problem. I wonder if Italy, Greece, and Malta will also remove/reform their law due to the same problem...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#532

Post by baobabKoodaa »

carlosjobim wrote: post #424
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "control" is mostly a fantasy. I own an appartment and when I found mold damage I wasn't able to just fix it, I had to take the housing association to court and fought with them for 2 years. It's now fixed and I'm trying to sell the appartment and nobody wants to buy it. Then I read articles like this and it just makes me laugh at the absurdity of it.

> nobody wants to buy it. Of course there are tons of people who want to buy it, but not for the price you are demanding. You are unrealistic about price.

Great! Why don't you tell me what I should price it at, then?

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#533

Post by gravescale »

Macha wrote: post #375
ivan_gammel wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc, 20% of all bedrooms in UK are spare bedrooms in houses that are too big for their owners. This is indeed underutilization.

As someone with spare bedrooms, this itself is a problem of undersupply. If you can't be sure of being able to trade up when you need to (e.g. after starting a family) because house prices are up 100% in 10 years, then you're going to want to buy a house for all possible future needs, rather than current needs. Add to that, things that might be desirable for other reasons, like garden space, rooms for use as offices,…

Also trading up comes with stamp duty, which is a damper on moving house unless you absolutely have to. Not only is your new house bigger and more expensive then anything you've ever bought before with that extra bedroom, plus the large expenses and hassle of moving in general, it's likely another £10k or more in stamp duty unless your new 3-bed is somewhere pretty cheap in the country. You don't get the first time buyer discount either, as you already have a house.

It's basically a tax that punishes labour mobility and not oversizing property.

Of course, you have to pay to heat and maintain that bigger house and pay higher council tax on it, so your saved stamp duty will probably be used after a few years, so in an ultra-rational way, it comes out in the wash, but it certainly doesn't feel like it at the time.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#534

Post by dukeyukey »

jmyeet wrote: post #504

Our economy is designed to extract wealth from the young to the old and the rich. Home ownership has become a primary method of creating generational wealth and that was a huge policy mistake. Even China has made this mistake. Almost all Western countries have too. So let me explain somethign that is often misconstrued about leftist sentiment, be in socialism or whatever: leftists generally make the distinction betwe…

Worth keeping in mind that the UK has quite a lot of social housing, more than most of it's European neighbours and Anglosphere offshoots, yet still struggles more than most with housing. Social housing is not a silver bullet.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#535

Post by dukeyukey »

bongodongobob wrote: post #120
TriangleEdge wrote: post #114

In my mind I redefine the housing crisis in Canada as a business clustering problem. I think the percentage of attractive businesses that are concentrated in a few areas is too high. This comes in conflict with the human desire to not live in a sardine can. I would leave my city, but where would I work? My options to have a dignified life feel limited to me, especially in tech. Tech bros like me are pretty constraine…

That doesn't make any sense to me. Tech bros don't make physical goods. You and I can do everything remotely. There's no reason to live in a big city other than you chose to.

We can do things remotely, but trying to do complex things with lots of expert input and less-than-perfect management is _way_ harder to do remotely than in-person. We evolved to work things out with other people, not via a low-res video and slightly out-of-sync audio.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#536

Post by lazyasciiart »

dogcomplex wrote: post #494
pfdietz wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminate regulations and laws limiting supply.

Or increase planning department funding with higher emphasis on throughput. It's the bureaucratic delay (nearly a year for approvals or revisions in many places) that causes much of the pain, not the regulations themselves.

About the biggest delay in Seattle permitting is the requirement to get a board of volunteer assholes to approve the visual appearance of the project, which is estimated to add an average of 8 months to the permitting process but is allowed to last for an indefinite period. The average total permitting time for these projects (over 35,000sq ft) is about 18 months.

Hopefully they will be thrown out soon. The really fun note is that these boards are almost entirely made up of architects who are getting the chance to single-handedly destroy a competitor’s work.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#537

Post by downrightmike »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #359
shuckles wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. In my experience, people "intuitively" jump to basically every conclusion besides this one. "Greedy landlords" or "[favorite scapegoat] collusion" are intuitive conclusions which are far more common than supply and demand. > Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same ina…

I only have firsthand experience in the US but it makes a lot of sense to me that the influence of colonization by Britain would cause all of the listed countries to have similar issues related to land use.

Every state west of the Mississippi has at least 50% of all land owned by the Fed Gov and isn't used at all. We have plenty of land, that isn't a real problem.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#538

Post by gonzo41 »

devindotcom wrote: post #524
Cheer2171 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle is building far more than many other cities and rents are lowering as a result. Rents are up nationally, but down over 7% in Seattle. If you've visited recently, the amount of new construction and cranes is immense. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hyunsoorim/2024/05/20/here-are-...

Anecdotally, all of my friends renting have had their rents continually raised with no breaks. Perhaps there is a wider trend, but if so, their landlords do not seem aware of it.

Part of that is also a fact that renters face the pressure that real estate firms now use big data to manage the rent accross a set of units. They know people will keep paying to avoid the skids so they can keep both rents high, and vacant houses because the over under makes them money. If you had the state / city charge rent to owners on vacant property you'd see rents fall through the floor as realestate companies would quickly pack anyone that could pay something into an structure.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#539

Post by jmrm »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #196
DGAP wrote: post #180

Stop subsidizing demand at the national level. Stop restricting supply at the local level.

That's not the problem at all. Stop allowing people to buy multiple homes. Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.

Exactly. It's insane how there are "landlords" (companies or even hedge funds) with dozens of flats in Airbnb in Spanish cities.

All the people and companies with some money in this country are buying those flats to rent them to tourists, and it's the most lucrative business someone can have as the expenses are minimum in comparison to the earnings.

If they taxed heavily having more than 10 homes they weren't whole neighbourhoods of tourists in our cities, and those who born there would have some opportunity to rent or buy something there, instead of having to having really far and losing most direct social relations they had

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#540

Post by Kephael »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #461
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

Seattle is building far more than many other cities and rents are lowering as a result. Rents are up nationally, but down over 7% in Seattle. If you've visited recently, the amount of new construction and cranes is immense. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hyunsoorim/2024/05/20/here-are-...

There were cranes everywhere back in 2017, now the cranes are mostly gone. My rent increases every year, generally by 10%.
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