Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

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

#591

Post by deepsun »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #569
deepsun wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> landlords are rent seeking and nothing else Noone says it's nothing else. But rent seeking is a big component of it, you just focus on other minor parts. In general, locking down some limited but critical commodity (e.g. land) is bad for any economic system. It doesn't really matter whether it's "Wall Street" or "your neighbor". A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value.

I am trying to read this charitably, but it is hard to read as anything but: 'landlords do not add value'.

Rephrasing my original point -- landlords do add value, but not as much to offset the negatives of locking down the resources.

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

#592

Post by tptacek »

ctoth wrote: post #584
tptacek wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't. I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman th…

Ownership share is a stock. Prices get set by flow - transactions. Housing is a thin market; maybe 5-6% of homes change hands in a given year. Price discovery happens at that transaction layer. Institutional investors own ~3% of single-family rentals nationally. But per CoreLogic they're 29% of purchases in the starter home tier. That's the market where we first-time buyers actually compete. In some metros it's more…

Whoah, hold up, your (3) is doing a lot more work than you think it is. Comps matter but they don't literally break the market:

* They impact listing prices but not necessarily clearing prices.

* They assume all the sellers, who are not corporate investors, can mechanically anchor off those inflated comps, without factoring in buyer budgets and carrying costs.

Real estate is slower than most financial products, but it's still an actual market. You can't just buy a tiny fraction of the inventory at an inflated price and assume the whole rest of the market will follow you.

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

#593

Post by pixelatedindex »

alextingle wrote: post #563
jazzyjackson wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society. IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction! N…

"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property. Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.

> exclusive use of the property.

This is almost never true. Leases come with a million stipulations, and they get to decide what you can and cannot do. It’s exclusive in the sense that the landlord can’t force other tenants on the place you’re renting.

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

#594

Post by enceladus06 »

lufenialif2 wrote: post #551
dheera wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If you want affordability, make the government efficient and tax people LESS . The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax. This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.

I’d imagine it’s less taxes and more you want to buy a nice house in the Bay Area where a lot of people are high earners and would be driving up prices on the low supply.

Yes and for some weird reason, the bay and all the nice places to live are all single-family and expensive as hell. Just build some soviet or Chinese style apartment blocks and give people housing like Singapore does its not that hard. This is not a democrat or republican issue, it is a have versus have-not issue.

The logical conclusion is that the residents of these desirable areas like the bay / San Diego / Seattle / DC actually want housing prices to stay high.

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

#595

Post by alextingle »

gfaster wrote: post #585
alextingle wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property. Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.

gp used "rent seeking" correctly. The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".

You should read the wiki article.

Criticising landlords is fine, but words (and phrases) have actual meanings, and the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords.

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

#596

Post by m463 »

drBonkers wrote: post #582
m463 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that japan has a system that keeps real estate dynamic with lower prices.

Have you read anything on this you could point me to?

here's something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418125

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

#597

Post by HEmanZ »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #48

The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…

The (now somehow) political position that blackrock is not the reason a house in Seattle is $1,000,000 is somehow the most hated position in America. Both my left wing friends and right wing family believe blackrock owns something like 30% of houses in America, and saying otherwise is heresy.

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

#598

Post by ch4s3 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #421
rgmerk wrote: 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…

The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that. In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments. The "American Dream" is a single-family-home, surrounded by other single-family homes, but even with urban sprawl we simply run int…

Where else do we simply accept that incumbents get to have full protection from loss at the expense of literally everyone else? Certainly other examples exist but we certainly wouldn’t tolerate wheat farmers stopping their neighbors from growing wheat.

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

#599

Post by [deleted] »

m463 wrote: post #568
rgmerk wrote: 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…

I've heard that japan has a system that keeps real estate dynamic with lower prices.

[deleted]

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

#600

Post by TZubiri »

kelipso wrote: post #95
TZubiri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor. That's quite an extreme political take. A more humble basic economic theory question would be: If you ban large institutional investors f…

Why would you need institutions to finance building new homes? You think the cost of building a home is more than the cost of buying a home? (Obviously not.) Normal people have been building their own homes using their own money for thousands of years.

> You think the cost of building a home is more than the cost of buying a home? (Obviously not.)

Common misconception, I used to have this as well.

Building is more expensive than buying for 2 reasons:

1- People can build custom houses to their taste, they pay a premium for that. 2- House prices fluctuate, most of the time house prices are below maximums, it's only during brief periods of time that building houses is suddenly bottlenecked by capital.

Yes, there is an industry behind building houses. Sure people can build homes themselves, that's cheaper than both buying a home, and building a commercial home, but for homes that are both a commoditized asset with general appeal and a house to live in, it's a different type of asset.

A house you build by yourself will never be worth much, but you'll live in it for sure. You can even spend a lot in improvements, but you end up with YOUR house, not with a resellable asset.

FWIW, building your house is quite independent of market conditions, so if that's your game you shouldn't care about the macroeconomics of industrial residential construction or tariffs on China's iron.

Post reply on HN