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

#671

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

tzs wrote: post #481

plank_time wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are old people with no income supposed to afford capital gains taxes? And if house prices go down do they get a refund?

Or working class people. For a large fraction of people if their taxes are going up faster than their wages are going up they do not have a reasonable way to get higher wages to pay for the tax. There is very little controversy over not taxing unrealized gains when it comes to income tax [1]. I'm not sure why doing the same thing for unrealized gains in property value is controversial. It's not like most of the thing…

> It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property

Exactly! The extraordinary taxes on property are a result of unfair distribution of cost of services. A city needs to collect for a budget of $X... so they distribute the costs the best they can.

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

#672

Post by wallacoloo » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

xapata wrote: post #51

adflux wrote: post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

> Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Most people pay for housing by monthly payments, making the nominal value of the house irrelevant if the monthly payment stays the same. Further, you should consider the home owner's "basket of goods" to include the hypothetical rent they'd be paying for an equivalent house. Their mortgage payments and home ownershi…

> Most people pay for housing by monthly payments, making the nominal value of the house irrelevant if the monthly payment stays the same.

Except homeowners get price exposure to the value of their home on the market. If you purchase and then go through a downturn which devalues your house, now you’re in the hole: you can’t use the sale price of the home to pay off the loan, so you’re stuck in that home until its value climbs again or you earn enough to pay off the loss.

Higher values means it takes longer for you to cover any % decline with wages, so you lose mobility for longer in a downturn. Irrelevant if you truly want to live in that place for 30 years, but not many people can actually make that commitment.

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

#673

Post by CodeWriter23 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #516

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you're someone who thinks building stack-and-pack residences is the incorrect response for an investor-manufactured housing shortage?

Then your thoughts are incorrect. Portland, Ore. is facing a huge housing crisis because single-home zoning prevented increasing density. Without the ability to create more housing on existing land, there is a shortage. It's that simple. They recently passed a law allowing more dense developments, and that will create more supply. There are currently 10 apartment projects in flight in the city, so there is no cabal c…

Yes, I’m familiar with that narrative. Perhaps it is reality in _Portland_and_handful_of_other_places. In that case, you’re actually specifying the different case of solving a real housing shortage, not a manufactured shortage.

I routinely take 3-mile walks through my neighborhood in NE Los Angeles. There are at least two homes on each block that are unoccupied. The nearby stack and pack developments don’t offset the inventory sitting idle.

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

#674

Post by milkytron » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #602

ta1234567890 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This depends heavily on the market at the time, since there are pressures from multiple directions. All else being equal, 6% of a higher price beats 6% of a lower price. But 6% of a lower price today in exchange for an hour of work beats $0 if the buyer walks and is not so easily replaced, and it might even beat 6% of a higher price if the higher price comes after many additional hours of work. Over a long enough tim…

> Over a long enough timeframe, the trend is toward higher prices, but it's not clear how much of a factor agents are in that, compared to many other factors.

I can't imagine agents would have much of an impact when compared to other causes of rising house prices. The way I see it, is that they are more of a kind of facilitator to increase the efficiency of the market, and don't have as much of a role in market behavior.

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

#675

Post by ipaddr » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

aggronn wrote: post #521

mattmcknight wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really market oriented, it's tragedy of the commons oriented, as developers will build the cheapest thing they can on the premise that new residents can use existing parking, resulting in a reduction of value for others utilizing those commons. By not having parking minimums, it allows developers to pass those costs onto surrounding residents. There are townhouse neighborhoods near me with nearly impassable…

The solution isn't to build more parking, its to reduce the need for car trips. Improve transit and support commercial development in the neighborhood. The fact is that we're in a housing affordability crisis. We need builders to build "cheapest thing they can" right now because housing is insanely expensive in most urban areas. Parking minimums make housing more expensive, and the fact that people are buying these h…

Improved transit works in megacities because of rapid transit but in this case they might add a bus route or the bus might come every 1/2 hour. You still do not have the scale to make public transit work unless you turn this place into an actual city.

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

#676

Post by delaynomore » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #461

JamesBarney wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Look at any typical city in North America, your priciest neighborhood likely has low density.

People tend to work away from where they live (at least for high paying jobs) and prefer having ample space at home therefore I don't think higher density would increase property value as you stated.

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

#677

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #656

spunker540 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

California and NYC have a declining population.

Along with huge portions of the rural midwest.

It all has to do with meeting the demand where the demand exists.

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

#678

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

igetspam wrote: post #668

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.

You could put it on the market and have contingencies that satisfy your agreement. As for selling to a pension fund specifically, I think that would be more work than it might be worth, and you'd probably be better off making it open to all types of buyers.

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

#679

Post by ipaddr » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

vladgur wrote: post #638

iso1210 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

What if that development was walking distance to transit? I live in SF Bayarea suburb in a SFH with a wife and a elementary school aged kid. We have 1 car that is parked in our driveway(on our property). For everything else there is a commuter train within 10-15minute walk and uber within reach. Limited parking does incentivize non-car-oriented lifestyle. Im all for it.

I'm all in for subways everywhere but do you feel as comfortable getting in a rush hour car after covid? I'm starting to think subways and megacities might not be the safest way to live.

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

#680

Post by bangoimby » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #343

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…

This is kind of textbook NIMBY although it is possible taking away the commercial zoning could make the area too light on commercial activity. But one of the main contributors to housing shortages is that areas have been overly permissive with commercial zoning (since they don’t have residents, city expenditure is low) which causes imbalances in the amount of jobs:people in an area. That in turn not only increases pr…

Bingo. Balance is way more important than density. It should be mandated by state law. Doesn't need to be per-city; you could have a system to trade jobs vs housing with neighboring cities or something.

A major irony is that California is approaching this all wrong. The "let Scott Wiener build whatever he wants" laws are in some cases being used to make the problem worse. See: Vallco Mall redevelopment plan, more jobs than housing.