811–820 of 1001 posts
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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.
I suppose that depends on the way the property tax system works. Paying 1-2% property tax each year on empty land does not seem like a path to riches.
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"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property. Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.
gp used "rent seeking" correctly. The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".
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…
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You may be interested in learning about the Land Value Tax[0] which will in effect, taxes become more burdensome for leaving land unproductive (e.g., empty housing or land). It also shifts the calculus on home improvements, which means remodeling your home or doing other perhaps large pieces of upkeep will not trigger a property tax increase as it does today, which is better for median home owners as well. [0]: https…
> home improvements, which means remodeling your home or doing other perhaps large pieces of upkeep will not trigger a property tax increase as it does today I have heard this complaint here a few times, but very few specifics. I would call getting your roof replaced or your kitchen/bathroom remodelled as major home improvements. Do these actually property tax increases?
A roof replacement isn’t really an improvement so much as expensive maintenance.
One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.
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> They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing. Raising prices when you only have a tiny portion of the market does not work. People won't buy them when there's…
The thing is that there is only a tiny portion of houses ever selling at any time. The only ones that would benefit from selling are people who are downsizing or moving away. If you buy 60% of the properties on market, the rest will see this and adjust their own prices. Usually this only works when the macro is favourable (low interest rates, easy mortgage applications, etc.), but it is definitely a large factor. It…
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Going by the graph in the article, that's still ~13% of homes owned by investors with >5 properties. And that's total of what is currently held, it speaks nothing of liquidity. That number likely includes investors who have had that property for a long time, the current property buy-up likely means far greater than 13% of the market right now is going to those sorts of aggregators. Dropping the price of a house by a…
>Personally, I think unoccupied homes in general ought to be penalized As is done in the UK
https://www.gov.uk/council-tax/second-homes-and-empty-proper...
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The actual value of a landlord is insulating the tenant from financial risk, charging a predictable rent and absorbing the costs of repairs and maintenance. That's a lot of value for some people, but it also comes with problematic incentives and obvious bad outcomes when combined with other aspects of housing markets.
In a perfect world, but rent is often less significantly predictable than mortgage payments. Of course the cost of repairs and maintenance isn’t absorbed, it is paid in full by the renter in the cost of rent.
Pure populism. If you believe that banning investors from buying SFHs will decrease the price of SFHs, why not also ban investors from buying apartments/condos?
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"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property. Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.
> exclusive use of the property. This is almost never true. Leases come with a million stipulations, and they get to decide what you can and cannot do. It’s exclusive in the sense that the landlord can’t force other tenants on the place you’re renting.