US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #485

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper. Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?

Not quite. But there ARE examples where the price growth was stopped by providing alternative options to the cycle of ever-densification. A really good example is Copenhagen, the world's most liveable city. Its current population is still _less_ than during the 1970's peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope... The driver for the decrease was suburban migration, as cars became more accessibl…

Do you have more details on this 1 example, specifically the trends of city housing prices and demand? A quick search [0] seems to show city housing prices increasing, rather than decreasing.

Obviously housing built outside the city will be cheaper than within it, and that might work for people who are fine living just anywhere (like away from the city), but the hypothesis is that the prices within the city increase when more housing (denser housing) is added within the city, right?

It's just hard to imagine how replacing a 300-unit occupied building downtown with 4-8 single-family-homes would result in the SFHs being cheaper than a unit in the skyscraper was.

0: https://www.courthousenews.com/copenhagen-housing-prices-dou...

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

#712

Post by khannn » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

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…

Increased supply comes in majority black and/or low-income neighborhoods here and it's "luxury" units all the way down. Gentrification is the name of the game, while simultaneously reducing social services.

In that light, this move is A-OK with me.

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

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Post by tpmoney » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #428

jazzyjackson wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Yes mortgage is often cheaper than rental, but the whole tradeoff is the commitment, just like all kinds of services, if you pay 40 years up front you can get a good deal, but do you really want to take out a loan to do that? Limiting landlords ability to buy property is reducing demand for construction, you want to inc…

That "less commitment" argument assumes that renters are content to be paying higher-than-mortgage costs for a property they'll never own. If they are, then it's true that the rental system is benefiting them. If they'd rather own their homes and be paying a mortgage, then the rental system is a hindrance. My intuition is that the majority of renters would rather be owners paying mortgages. This is less true of certa…

> but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there.

Now imagine trying to asses the potential problems with a living space before committing the next 30 years of those payments, plus locking yourself into that single living space and taking on the single and sole responsibility for repairing or addressing all of those problems yourself.

Look, I really like owning my own home, but when I signed a rental agreement, for the duration of the agreement that was the most money I would ever spend on my housing. And I never once worried about replacing a roof, or replacing an HVAC unit, or replacing a water main. I've owned my own home now for over a decade and my monthly housing expenditure is nearly 2x what it was when I started between tax increases, insurance increases and loans to pay for the various major repairs, and that's with a fixed rate primary mortgage. And that's my cost increases AFTER the insurance payouts. The townhome I first rented when I moved to the area currently rents for about $100 LESS than I pay each month. Granted when I bought the place, it was renting for about $200 more per month than I was paying but that basically means renting vs buying was a wash as far as costs go. Yes, to a degree I got unlucky, but that's also the point, I couldn't know if I was going to be unlucky or not before agreeing to the mortgage. As a renter I could get reviews and recommendations or warnings from prior tenants and at least have a chance of knowing what I was getting into.

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

#714

Post by tyami94 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:30 AM UTC

pepperball wrote: post #376

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…

[flagged]

Speaking from experience, that is miles ahead of living on the street.

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

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Post by tpmoney » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:34 AM UTC

spiritplumber wrote: post #684

indymike wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail. The company I sold to already owne…

no offence but this kind of makes you part of the problem

Part of the problem is how hard it is to sell a home in the first place. I'm not interested now, but for a while I was looking at needing to move states, and that was going to involve selling my home and buying (or renting) in the new location. And all the math was saying that anything other than getting really lucky with a sale just before moving was going to cost me a LOT of extra money and be a drain and a hassle on top of all of the stresses involved with moving to a completely new state.

I really hate the idea of selling to these "we'll buy your home fast" shops, but I have to be honest that had I needed to make that move, it would have been a very real possibility.

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

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Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:38 AM UTC

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…

It really depends on the market. The institutional investors are common in the South and Southwest. I think the fact that they exist at all is a problem.

You are correct however that smaller private investors are more common. I live in a small city. Small property management companies from NYC and NJ are pretty commonly buying up 2-4 family houses. I suspect that some of these "small" players aren't small at all, but hiding in a maze of LLCs.

I know a couple of dudes from way back that have leveraged their way to a real estate empire with >2000 homes in the region.

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

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Post by tpmoney » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

runjake wrote: post #348

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…

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are. I'm pretty naive to the issue, but awhile back I took a look at property records for my neighborhood. In fact, equity firms, including BlackRock, were buying up a bunch of houses in my neighborhood. A tiny datapoint, I know. Edit: It might've been Blackstone. It's been about a year since I looked it up. Edit 2: Looking up records now , it looks like mo…

> Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?

I never went far enough to get all the details back when I was considering a move, but my impression is a lot of these "buy your home and close fast" corporate purchasers were offering just enough to make the speed and ability to not have to make a lot of major improvements worth the lost money from selling on the market. Then they do just enough work to clean up any "show stopper" problems and re-sell at market prices.

So (very simplified) if you have a home that might sell for 200k on the market if you put 10k of work into it, but you need to move in a few months, and you need to pay off 100k on the loan, the company offers you something like 180k. You walk away with 80k (instead of 90k) in your pocket and avoid the various real estate agent fees and the need to do any of the fix up work or deal with trying to sell and move at the same time. The company puts the $10k of work into it and sells for the 200k, pocketing the $10k you gave up.

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

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Post by Seattle3503 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:47 AM UTC

cush wrote: post #664

pianopatrick wrote: post #601

I'd be fine with a policy of "you can rent housing you build" for American corporations. If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world. Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.

You can rent a home after you’ve personally owned it and lived in it for 10 years? That would cap any individual to 3-4 rentals in a lifetime

We need more rental units, and it isn't clear how that policy would help the situation.

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

#719

Post by KumaBear » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:52 AM UTC

pianopatrick wrote: post #601

I'd be fine with a policy of "you can rent housing you build" for American corporations. If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world. Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.

Then it would be lucrative to buy up land and sit on it to hold a monopoly on the competition. Can’t build or rent what you can’t buy.

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

#720

Post by happyopossum » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:55 AM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #590

There's a service called Arrived (I believe Jeff Bezos invested) that lets people buy fractional shares of single-family homes and earn a proportional share of the rent. If you sell, you're effectively selling your percentage of the property. As a renter, I was drawn to this as a way to get some exposure to real estate, and I ended up investing in a vacation rental. At the same time, I'm pretty conflicted about it. P…

> Profiting from vacation housing feels different to me than profiting from people’s primary shelter, which is a basic necessity.

If you believe that nobody should profit from providing housing, what do you propose as the incentives for people to build, capitalize, and maintain said housing?