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

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

#791

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…

Another example that cars take too much space. Public transportation is the answer.

and bikes

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

#792
post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

Gambling your entire net worth on a single hyper-local investment is not a good idea.

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

#793
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real disaster (environmental and economic) is that so many places regulate parking so strictly rather than being more market-oriented and allowing people to figure out how much they want. https://www.planetizen.com/features/113459-perils-central-pl...

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…

Another solution is robotaxis. If ridehailing becomes easily affordable You will have your nice neighborhood back. Robotaxis can pick you up in a minute and go to park and recharge in some distant multi story parking.

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

#794
post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

It is worthwhile to recognize that there is nothing unusual in this response, many homeowners feel this way.

But then by same token we can also move to justifying other things, like not hiring people without CS degrees (I spent $xxx,xxx on my CS degree, I want to protect its value), only hiring other MBAs, only hiring people with prior experience in tech companies etc. – which can perpetuate and amplify inequality in opportunity among society.

At what point do we move from that to a more altruistic viewpoint? I am genuinely not sure.

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

#795
post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

If you could unravel all perverse effects of American localist planning and regulation, it would be great. But if the idea is just "let the developers build where they want and that solves everything", that idea is wrong. Developers don't want to build the dense, affordable house that's needed. Developers want to take advantage of the existing housing and housing expectation and build one bigger house or bigger devel…

Developers make money by building what people want.

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

#796
post #788

66,781,000 Detached Single Family Homes in the US [0] $272,400 median home selling price in the US, 2020 [1] That's just over $18 Trillion for the entire US Detached Single Family Home market. I'd be interested to know how much Blackrock has budgeted for this fund (and how much of the spend is leveraged, and up to what number. And who else is doing the same type of fund and to what magnitude). Note that per Statista,…

Median != mean. Multiplying it literally means "The value of this particular house I know nothing about times 66 millions".

Well, that is true.

Looks like the average is $368,400:

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_existing_singlefamily_home...

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

#797
post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

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…

Blaming real estate agents is just silly. They're salespeople so of course they're going to try to maximize commissions. Ultimately it's up to the buyer to agree on the price or walk away.

Listing prices are almost totally meaningless. At most they're just a starting point for initial negotiations.

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

#798
post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel perfectly safe using public transit. 36,120 people died in traffic in 2019 in the United States. When there isn't a pandemic going on and I'm getting the annual flu vaccine, I feel pretty darn safe compared to driving

But there is an ongoing pandemic going on we can't go back to 2019. The new delta variant makes the vaccine weak. What are the chances this mutates again and again? It doesn't seem like a healthy approach for humans anymore.

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

#799
post #361
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not fair, that's just some unrelated thing...

Yeah, different cabal.

I didn't claim it was all the same cabal. However, it's very likely there are some actors with membership in both.

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

#800
post #447
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The California Tax Postponment Program prevents displacement of low income seniors and the disabled. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary.

These programs often have terrible red tape and even awareness problems. They also ignore people who aren’t seniors but may be going through temporary rough spots. I prefer to have the prop 13 rules fundamentally built in an applied to all primary residences as a measure to provide a more universal stability of a home.

I would prefer that prop13 did not apply to commercial property, and that it only applied to the first 500k of home value.
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