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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

#62
post #45

One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.

There has to be some nuance. Companies are known to either rent of sometimes own housing for personnel who travel to other offices. Universities typically own housing as well. So maybe it’s something like it can’t be one of the main businesses of the corp to buy up residential housing as an investment tool.

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses.

> Universities typically own housing as well.

I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

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

#65

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

> 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.

And just in general reducing the restrictions on building in places with high rent to income ratios.

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

#66

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars, but, again, they will not finance $2500 over five years. So cars and houses are just built to the price point which will satisfy the lenders. You may not hate financialization nearly as much as it deserves.

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

#68

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Even if it is only 0.5% I would prefer that large institutional investment firms not be allowed into the housing market.

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

#69

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

This is pretty far down in the list of consequences we should be thinking about but building more housing in desirable, coastal areas of the US will only serve to exacerbate the political and cultural divide between the two Americas.

I know we all hate on the electoral college, but it exists and it isn't going away anytime soon.

I'm not saying the answer is to force folks to move to "flyover country", but that's what you'd do if you wanted to avoid another presidential victory by a trump-like character.

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

#70

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Encouraging the creation of new housing is the way to go. One thought— what percentage of new home purchases are made by large investors and is it growing? This seems like the most important metric to look at rather than existing ownership.

There are examples of entire subdivisions being built to order for private investors to rent out. It’s called “built to rent.”

https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/commercial...

Corporate ownership mapped:

https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/who-owns-amer...

https://storage.pardot.com/153411/17634993251KmjZ4d2/whoa_ma...

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