Property market could be easily fixed by banning buying residential property for investments. Easiest thing in the world to do, but it won't be done until a certain generation is dead and buried.
Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
611–620 of 634 posts
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Housing will always be expensive in one way or the other, but you can make it cheaper and more plentiful. And that should be the goal. When housing becomes an investment, the goal is to get that sweet ROI which generally means working to restrict the supply of housing to make prices rise. Lobbying is a high-ROI activity. And housing doesn’t need to be expensive. Japan is a good example. It’s only expensive because…
> When housing becomes an investment, the goal is to get that sweet ROI which generally means working to restrict the supply of housing to make prices rise. Lobbying is a high-ROI activity. There are many ways to lobby that increase both the value of real estate and make the system better. For example, you could lobby for a visa for immigrant construction workers, which will reduce the cost to build. > And housing do…
> Healthcare is the *show it is precisely because it is NOT a free market by any practical or theoretical definition.
100% agree with you. Which is why we should nationalize it to drive down the cost since there is currently no downward pressure on pricing. It’s not some “radical experiment” — in all honesty our current system is the experiment and it’s going poorly. Nationalized healthcare works, and from what I’ve seen, is usually of higher quality and service than we have here in the US. Turns out you can adequately staff your hospitals when you’re not trying to turn a profit.
And on the subject of nimbyism, you may be right about commercial landlords, but homeowners are very concerned with quality of life — which also raises home values (maybe not as much as increased density would, but enough that most nimbys see it as a worthwhile trade off). Things like schools not being overcrowded, available street parking, well-maintained parks, etc.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
If instead of buying the house cash I put it all into bitcoin at the begining of the year I'd now have enough to pay off the mortgage, the early repayment fee and have change to spare. This being the utter fucking fallacy of hypothesising with the benefit of perfect information.
Personally I wouldn't touch bitcoin, nor do I consider it an asset. Returns on stock investments are historically high for the last couple of decades it's true, but if you take the average of say 5% a year, it's still much better than putting that money into a mortgage, when you can borrow the money over a long time period at It's not a trick, it's simple maths. It certainly doesn't always work, and there are risks i…
You've basically just reinvented the endowment mortgage. That went really well for everyone in the 90s.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#614Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…
I'll be the YIMBY broken record here. These institutional investors are suddenly interested in housing because decades of artificial constraints on new construction have created a situation where prices are rising quickly as demand outpaces supply. Don't believe me? Here's the SEC filing from one such investor: > We have selected locations with strong demand drivers, high barriers to entry and high rent-growth potent…
My guess is you live in the Bay Area?
In places with the most constrained supply, they cannot afford to buy. They stick to once affordable suburbs and reduce supply.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I wouldn't touch bitcoin, nor do I consider it an asset. Returns on stock investments are historically high for the last couple of decades it's true, but if you take the average of say 5% a year, it's still much better than putting that money into a mortgage, when you can borrow the money over a long time period at It's not a trick, it's simple maths. It certainly doesn't always work, and there are risks i…
You've basically just reinvented the endowment mortgage. That went really well for everyone in the 90s.
No. I wasn't suggesting investing to pay off the mortgage (endowment mortgage), but investing as an alternative use of funds compared to paying off a debt held at low interest rates in a rapidly depreciating currency.
Imagine a more extreme example:
Interest rates 0.1%, Inflation 10%, 30 year term, leverage meaning your 50k becomes say 500k invested.
Now it makes sense to take on as much debt as you can get over say 30 years, and to put off paying it as long as possible, because even after a few years the payments will be quite minor compared to your inflating income, and at the end of the 30 years the debt you have left and the interest payments on it will be trivial compared to your income.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#616Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…
I agree. I wish people understood more of what these "institutional investors" are doing. The Fed has essentially trapped us in a system where the likes of blackrock get access to essentially free Fed printing press money right of the rollers that they then use to buy up real assets at inflated prices, which only drives up the inflation that thereby also drives up the value of previous purchases at near zero rate int…
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Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a moderately sized Midwestern city. We don't have a shortage of new construction or regressive zoning laws.
Well, that’s fantastic for you. I’ve got friends in Kansas City whose 100k house is now worth 300k. Friends in Omaha buying new construction for 400k. Housing shortages in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I am from. If you’re immune to all of this, you must be in either a very magical, or very undesirable place. It must not be California, that’s for sure.
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Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#618Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…
> they will happily rent to you since that is the the plan all along - own all the assets, and every generation after X gets to rent Maybe if there wasn't the NA obsession with "home ownership" none of this would matter. Part of what is driving home prices are people with FOMO paying any price. Why?
In the US specifically, home ownership has been the primary way that many people have "built" wealth in the 20th and 21st centuries. It also gives you the ability to participate as a citizen in many more ways than a renter, as you have influence over local public policy in many more concrete ways.
Lastly, it's hard to overstate to a non-American how much owning a home is seen as a central part of American identity. It's almost like part of "growing up" in a way. I say this in a tone of trying to explain haha, please don't perceive this as being pedantic.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm I guess what you would call a supply and demand absolutist. There's no "correct" amount of development or "optimal" level of density (wrt prices, I mean; obviously people have preferences ). If you let demand outpace supply, then you should expect the available market-rate housing to increase in price. (And that's true even if you think your city is building a lot, or if you think it's already really dense, or if…
There are limits to how many people land can carry. Vancouver builds up onto a mountain, which is crazy. Yes, for some price, we could terrace the mountain or even remove it. Vancouver is a boom bust town for real estate, now it is in a boom, it will bust eventually, just like it has many times before. There is just too much speculation going on to represent stable demand.
Sorry to have to keep disagreeing, but we are nowhere near any geological limits in Vancouver. As I pointed out above, most of the city is still composed of single-family homes. It's not just that it's not all massive towers. It's not even duplexes or quad-plexes or small apt complexes. It's low-rise bungalows on single-family-only lots.
There's tons of space in the Vancouver metro to add density. The issue is that it's illegal.
Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish this would anger people more It is... But what are you going to do about it? Especially in the US, big business owns the politicians who can do something about it. And prop 22 shows that even if the public gets to decide, big business manages to control public opinion to their benefit. I believe this is only going to get worse for the next couple of decades. Something major would have to happen for this to c…
So wait. Either big business owns the politicians and so nothing gets done, or people vote but they're too stupid to do it in their own interests because of big business? This sounds like the typical "the election was fair as long as I won" trope. Have you considered that maybe your opinion is just in the minority?
I see what you're getting at, but Brexit is objectively shit for the majority of people, yet the majority voted for it. There are plenty more examples like it.