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

#661

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #633

bennysomething wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops c…

It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand

> so supply > demand

Nope.

Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities).

There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities because even at auction for pennies nobody wants to bid on rural properties. There was one going through here just last week.

Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.

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

#662

Post by starclerk » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #575

jMyles wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Hyperbole doesn't help here. Legalizing four-plexes in your neighborhood will almost never knock a million dollars off your home's value. I bet it'd be hard to find many examples of upzoning causing SFHs to drop significantly in price anywhere.

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

#663

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #574

BizarroLand wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed— like a lot of these things, it would punish upper-middle class families who inherit a cottage, but not affect anyone with >5 residences since at scale the work needed to evade becomes worthwhile.

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

#664

Post by bangoimby » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #355

brightball wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception. We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land. Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been…

Yes. If you believe that no town homes should be built in the U.S. than you might not qualify as NIMBY. But if you believe that town homes shouldn't be built next to you that's the definition of NIMBY. Of course every instance has a long list of reasons why next to them is especially bad, character of the neighborhood, parking issues, infrastructure, etc.... But the end result of everyone fighting increased density i…

No. People always say density helps availability, and price increases are due to the denser areas being more desirable.

The major factor driving housing inflation is restricted supply, which is relative to demand. Demand is created primarily by jobs. The difference between jobs and employed residents (with overhead for non-working family members etc) drives the imbalance. If demand was being met, prices would plummet.

This factor is orthogonal to overall density. The Bay Area is expensive because there is not enough housing for the jobs. If San Jose became as dense as SF, it would not help anything, unless that growth was focused primarily on housing. But San Jose already supplies net housing and SF supplies net jobs. These are not small imbalances either; they are both 6 figures in 2008 ACS commute data. (Unfortunately that dataset seems to be compiled very infrequently, but I doubt things have changed much other than density increasing.)

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

#665

Post by jnosCo » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #574

BizarroLand wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's already multiple rules for "primary residency", you could structure a progressive property tax off of that.

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

#666

Post by nradov » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #587

nradov wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More homes and more people doesn't necessarily make an area more desirable. Many people prefer space, privacy, and quiet. Those things are more important to them than property values.

That is fantastic for retirement but 80% of people who live in Urban areas value above all else seemingly proximity to jobs which are driven themselves by the proximity of many people which is often driven by the proximity to desirable features like ports.

Retirement isn't the issue. Most people who live in suburban areas today close to live in low density areas. They don't want their neighborhoods to become urban regardless of what that would mean for proximity to jobs and other desirable features.

Stop trying to tell people what they ought to want. Not everyone agrees.

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

#667

Post by plank_time » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #345

plank_time wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods, the older, wealthy, established residents are paying 1/3rd the taxes needed to support infrastructure and services, compared to newer, younger residents who are trying to establish a nest-egg and raise families without the benefits the older generations had. There is no one solution that will work for every neighborhood, but prop 13 is economic warfare on the young. Portraying it as…

Citation otherwise this is just your biased anecdote.

There’s plenty of turnover in California on par with other states. If prop 13 were somehow so powerful a factor not to sell, you would see a lot less house sales which you don’t.

In my city, half the houses were sold in the last 20 years which sounds pretty good to me. The idea that property taxes are frozen to 30 years ago and governments are starving for money is fiction.

In places like Toronto where property taxes get assessed every year, the property taxes 1/3 for an equivalent house price.

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

#668

Post by igetspam » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

I'm about 99% sure I'll get downvoted for this but how do I sell my house a pension fund? I have a house with a renter in it and I would gladly sell it to anyone who would buy it without having to displace the renter. Right now, I'm stuck holding it for a little while longer because the renter and I have an agreement.

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

#669

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #582

Retric wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only true up to a tipping point when poor people move in. Parts of Detroit are a great example where poor people are diving down the value of houses around them. People essentially want to be surrounded by people of almost exactly their economic class to somewhat richer. To rich and stores they can’t afford to stay ie gentrification, to poor and you have to move ie white flight.

I think you have it exactly backwards the cost goes down due to the area being a less desirable location allowing the poor to afford the houses there. If you analyzed the situation better it is extremely likely that there is an underlying cause that isn't poor people moving in. The economic situation in Detroit has been shit and getting shittier for years now leading to the people who are more capable and therefore a…

It is a little bit of both, at least when it comes to maintaining a local public school’s rating. People will oppose lower income housing to prevent the children of lower income people from attending the same schools, which might cause the school’s rating to go down. Which would then be downward pressure on the price of the land.

Every real estate website has school ratings for each house listing because it is such a sought after amenity.

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

#670

Post by bangoimby » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

neilparikh wrote: post #646

Justsignedup wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that density means more people, more homes, more availability. That means more jobs open up and makes the place more lively. More desireable. That means the house property value will go up. They are thinking "will this make the property value go down in the next 5 years"? vs "will this make the property value skyrocket in the next 10 years". We are catering to short-term gains at the expense of long-term…

Many NIMBYs aren't purely financially driven. What they want is for their neighborhood to stay exactly as it was when they moved in, with the same type of people, and same amount of traffic. Bay Area has plenty of this type. Many of them already have had property value skyrocket (50K -> 2M is not uncommon), so they can just have both (high property values, and preserve their neighborhood exactly as they want it).

Honestly I think this would be fine. The problem is they allow FANG to build giant offices, which brings new 400k-income jobs and bids up the restricted supply.

I think they should be forced to choose one or the other. Keep their SFH and say no to FANG, or accept townhomes and condos to balance out the new jobs.