Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

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

#761

Post by newtonsmethod »

Aurornis wrote: post #511
newtonsmethod wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're getting your facts wrong: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/01/business/trump-furniture-... "President Donald Trump has delayed new tariff increases on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets, and vanities for a year, pushing their implementation to 2027, according to a White House statement."

You're right, I probably got some of the increases delayed. But those are increases on top of the already high tariffs.

I agree with you, they'll probably worsen the effect, and I assume this is maybe 5% in the long run from all these tariffs (if they're not cancelled).

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

#762

Post by felineflock »

happyopossum wrote: post #725
felineflock wrote: post #604

The root cause for the low affordability seems to be that most people don't want to sell a house purchased at 3% interest and have to pay for a new one at 6%. That and zoning restrictions too contribute for the lack of supply.

There was a huge affordability problem 4 years ago when the rates were 3% too, so that’s clearly not the “root cause”. In fact, at the time HN was filled with people blaming the “free money” 3% rates for the lack of affordability…

LOL, you live in California? The past affordability you are talking about was not universal. There were plenty of people happily buying homes after moving out of CA to other states.

Anyhow, interest rates are the root cause now. Who in their right mind would do the trade I've described?

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

#763

Post by pests »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #142
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…

From the moment I saw this in the WSJ this morning, I was wondering what people were going to come up with in order to be against this obviously-good idea, just because Trump said it. Now I know.

Too much TDS man. Not everything is about Trump.

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

#764

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

happyopossum wrote: post #727
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #113

If I were renting a house, I would much rather deal with a business than an individual landlord. On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.

> On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed. Did you read the article? The impetus was a tweet where he called on congress to write and pass a law to this effect.

This is not how the law works. The president shouldn’t be able to do stuff and ask Congress to sign off on afterwards

> In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban,

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

#765

Post by janalsncm »

zahlman wrote: post #738
m4ck_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industri…

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from It's strange to me that moving to LCOL wasn't a much bigger thing during the period when everyone was working remotely.

A lot of people did try moving to Texas, but with RTO it didn’t last.

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

#766

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jjav wrote: post #665
pixelatedindex wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. But sure they maintain houses. Although just the bare minimum, they will never fix it nicely - just enough to rent it out.

> They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. For a house to be available for me to rent, both things need to happen. Someone had to build it, obviously. But just as necessary, someone needs to offer it up for a rental.

One of these things precedes the other in time, however, which may be significant.

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

#767

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

Right, and the large corporations just buy up all the service companies in the area and squeeze both the landlords and renters at once. The only way to achieve fairness is straight socialism.

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

#768

Post by danielmarkbruce »

yunwal wrote: post #692
mhb wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't your explanation apply to every commodity? Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity? These are also essential products subject to the influence of markets and market makers.

Just curious, where do you live that electricity is sold in an open market? Seems like a very strange setup.

Much of the US works this way, but individual consumers don't buy it that way. It's the level above that.

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

#769

Post by newtonsmethod »

Aurornis wrote: post #508
newtonsmethod wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the first half of what you posted, but immediately jumping to blaming tariffs in your last paragraph seems weak (and a slight attempt at a gotcha). Concrete, gypsum and steel are primarily domestically produced. Similar goes for wood (although a substantial amount is imported, e.g. from Canada - the tariffs range from 25% to 50%). Labour & Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50…

Tariffs on products like lumber and cabinetry were introduced or raise on January 1st of this year. It's an additional factor that will make a bad situation worse. You can't tell me that increasing the pricing of construction materials won't have negative pressure on home construction. > Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50% of this is likely materials, with likely a minority of the mater…

I have agreed tariffs will have an effect, but I'm not being myopic.

Lot costs, builder profits, indirect labour (commissioning, financial and legal affairs, advertising) all are far less affected by tariffs. Machine costs could make up 15% of your "labour and material" cost but depreciation and repair purchases are still only 30% of this, with of course not all of this affected by tariffs.

It seems wholly reasonable to believe that the long term effects of a tariff policy like these on housing costs could indeed be in the ballpark of 5%, as I claim, because in fact housing development is less affected by this.

I'm not sure if you trust this for consensus, but you could try asking an AI to give an estimate of the long-term impact for you. Here's what Gemini 3 Pro said to "Estimate the increase Trump's current tariffs, if long term, would have on price of new housing developments."

> Total Home Price Impact: This translates to a roughly 3% to 4% increase in the final purchase price for the consumer.

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

#770

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

potato3732842 wrote: post #647
tshaddox wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. Let's ignore property management for now and focus on landlords (i.e. people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job. Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking.

>Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking. First off you're using "rent seeking" wrong, it's a specific economic term that means something else. But using your definition.... There's entire industries built around renting capital investments. Sometimes purely, like rental equipment. Sometimes the investmentents are so expensive they come with the labor to operate them (the way many buildings hav…

> First off you're using "rent seeking" wrong, it's a specific economic term that means something else.

It is a specific term, but it means: taking control of a limited resource (e.g. housing), most typically by ownership, that you do not have any direct use for, and then seeking revenue by then renting it to other people who actually want to use it (e.g. live in it).

Which, not suprisingly, is precisely what landlords are doing.

And also not surprisingly, those "entire industries" would be rent-seeking if the resources they rent out were limited. However, that does not apply to rental equipment, for example (though there are a few specific exceptions in the case of extremely expensive, very complex and/or very large equipment).

Post reply on HN