If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by asdff » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #4

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…

Depends on where you live. In CA property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home when you bought it. If you give the deed to your kids they can pay taxes at this rate as well. Plenty of homeowners and landlords in CA are enjoying their locked in 1976 tax rate today. It used to be you'd help your kid get a job at you or your friends company, now you just hand them the deed of the dingbat apartment your father built on the lot of your former single family home in the 1970s before that was illegal, and they are set for life without ever having to work a job again. Getting 5 units of people paying market rate for a 1 bedroom means you are making over 6 figures.

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

#572

Post by jMyles » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #547

davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

If "protect its value" means maintain and strengthen it, retrofit it against likely disasters, plant gardens and craft way to preserve the products, add off-grid energey infrastructure, etc., then that's great.

If it means try to use the heavy hand of the state to prevent others from living their best life, then you aren't protecting anything; you're violently stealing the future net worth of others and making it your own.

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

#573

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #474

plank_time wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When houses get sold, capital gains need to be paid. This is nothing new.

Not if the house gets sold by a kid after their parents died. At that point, the capital gains tax basis gets reset. In the current tax climate, we will never sell our houses. It's an amazing way to transfer wealth while avoid capital gains. And if they don't want to sell, the kids keep the original prop 13 tax limitations as well. The current housing policies and tax system is a disaster.

[deleted]

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

#574

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #509

rcpt wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the tax advantages have a lot to do with it to. A portfolio of several thousand Prop 13 jackpots is a pretty good situation to be in.

Makes me wish that they would increase property taxes for multiple residence owners & make sure to include residential conglomerates. It should be that each additional house after the first has a tax penalty that increases on a logarithmic scale to make it financially unsavory for people to own more than one house. In an ideal world, owning multiple homes would be an ostentatious display of wealth and not a common in…

The wealthy will just create a bunch of LLCs that own one house each.

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

#575

Post by spoonjim » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #572

spoonjim wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

If "protect its value" means maintain and strengthen it, retrofit it against likely disasters, plant gardens and craft way to preserve the products, add off-grid energey infrastructure, etc., then that's great. If it means try to use the heavy hand of the state to prevent others from living their best life, then you aren't protecting anything; you're violently stealing the future net worth of others and making it you…

It’s all violent stealing back to the white people who took this land from its settlers at the wrong end of a gun. I got ripped off and I’m not going to be the bigger man and be the first person in this chain to say “it’s ok, I don’t mind losing a million dollars on this.”

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

#576

Post by lliamander » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #414

lliamander wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was from a series of predictions made by the WEF in 2016 about life in 2030[0]. The claim of many is that the WEF wants to bring about a world in which the vast majority of people don't have ownership. Reuters "fact checks"[1] this claim by saying that it was merely a prediction, and that it isn't actually a goal listed on their website. I find the fact check unpersuasive. The WEF says "you will be happy" about no…

It's pretty clearly just a provocative list of predictions and not a call to action. It's like a commercial from 1995 saying "You'll have a phone in your pocket everywhere you go". They're predicting it will be a major trend that consumers adopt because it will makes sense when it comes. It's not even that crazy of a prediction. There's loads of shit in my house that I use maybe once a year and I wouldn't mind sharin…

An NGO comprised of the world's wealthiest corporations telling the rest of us that we will "own nothing and be happy" is a bit cheeky, to say the least.

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

#577

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

cycrutchfield wrote: post #334

GloriousKoji wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 is a limits how much property tax can increase in a year. So hypothetically without prop 13 it would possible that the value of your house jumps 10x and then you're stuck with paying 10x the amount of property tax that year. I don't think we need to remove it completely but some adjustments like applicable only to a primary residence and not investment or commercial properties would probably go a long way.

If the value of my home jumped 10x in a year, I would be ecstatic. Are you kidding?

I'm planning on living in my house for a very long time, it's my home, not an investment. I don't want my home value going up 10x unless I'm planning on selling it. In this market, I couldn't replace my house if I sold it anyway.

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

#578

Post by _greim_ » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #346

_greim_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went down the Geoist/LVT rabbit-hole myself. It strikes me as uniquely appealing across the political spectrum, since it reduces tax on wealth-creation AND redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor. Sadly, this very fact provokes enough superficial resistance to keep it out of the Overton window. Whenever it comes up, shouters on either side have plenty of ammo to blast it, saying things to the effect…

It's never appealing to make a long time member of a community leave because they can no longer afford the land they've owned for years, because other people say "I want that" I move to a cheap, small town. I embed myself in the community and help build it up over decades. And then, at the peak popularity, in part due to my presence, I am forced out, because someone who has never been here says that they would like t…

I guess I'm confused; how is this not a description of the current system? How are LVTs supposed to make this kind of thing worse?

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

#579

Post by granshaw » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #551

spoonjim wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

Hmmm this just seems like a bad decision on your part. I bought my house in 2018 and it was expensive, yes, but definitely manageable on my salary. I definitely would not buy a house right now, especially if it required spending 'my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth'.

It's a vicious cycle – OP and others are forced to commit most of their wealth to own a home because of all the NIMBYs that came before them, and on and on.

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

#580

Post by icyfox » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

ta1234567890 wrote: post #540

davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

And, at least in California, realtors will always push prices up. It’s pretty much never in their best interest to lower the price. Even the buyer’s agent gets paid a percentage of the sale price, so if they try to lower it they’d be essentially working against themselves. And this is without even accounting for all the schemes realtors create (like listing below market to get a lot of offers and create artificially…

Fun fact: Listings in California used to contain a unilateral offer of subagency by default. So _all_ realtors were legally bound to work in the seller's interest, even if a buyer had reached out to them in the first place. So you can imagine how often you would disclose your buying criteria to "your" agent only to have them utilize that against you.