841–850 of 1001 posts
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up...
As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entrants, we will be stuck with this problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. 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. The things that they do have mass…
> 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…
https://papersourceonline.com/wall-street-has-spent-billions...
https://www.kut.org/texasstandard/2022-06-14/texas-home-sale...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe just stop telling people what cases are "legitimate" reasons to protect themselves and what cases aren't. I know multiple people who have gotten death threats because of technical comments they made online, or just for having the temerity to exist as a member of a minority group. Not the vague "I'm going to kill you" kind, the "here's a picture of your front door on Google Street View, and an unsolicited piz…
I don't feel like the solution to this is having victims set up LLCs.
How about you make an iron clad promise people will be safe? How about if someone dies because of your minor concerns, you go to jail for life?
Would you be so "oh well" then?
If not, you're probably not taking people's very lives seriously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The two times I’ve stayed in an apartment complex, they had staff onsite and repairmen and someone on call. The individual landlord doing this on the side is likely undercapitalized and operating on thin margins and not budgeting for repairs
The difference here comes from the distinction between corporate landlords that actually want a sustainable business, and corporate landlords that know they will never make the money back for either rent control or market reasons and so only care about extracting as much money as possible before the building falls apart.
I can tell you that the suburb to a mid city on the eastern seaboard I lived in did not have rent control, but rentals in the $12-1600 range with pest and mold infestation are in great abundance. I'm sure it'd be a total surprise to hear that I live in a state that skews hard in favor of landlords and offers next to no protections for tenants, because you know, deregulation always works out for the little guy, right?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only problem is that in the US, if you let apartments and townhouses to be built, homeowners will get muscled out by large builder concerns and single family homes will be converted into dense housing--which sounds great, until you realize there's no way those housing concerns will SELL those units--they're going to be rented forever. There's no incentive to actually sell those to people and every reason to keep…
Surely they'll sell if the price is right.
"Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up... As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entra…
If your rentoid decides to rip the copper wiring out, or not pay their rent for a year, then you’ve wiped out 10 years of profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in order to raise or lower prices in an area, or using other mechanics to manipulate pricing, across the entire market, depending on the intended actions. If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area, if they intend to ren…
This is extremely silly. Prices are high because we don't build enough houses which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, then the houses we have built are all owned by empty nesters and people with 1 - 3 investment properties. Everything else you're describing is completely ridiculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These qualitative standards are subjective. Everyone has something that they deem essential and others not so much. A lot of zoning regulations is the amalgamation of preferences by different people, because they try to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of too many people. For example in New York City go take a walk in the streets next to hundred-year-old skyscrapers in downtown. It’s miserable to me. Now go walk alo…
Millions of people want to live in NYC and would productively contribute to the city if it were more affordable. The government should not criminalize development that would make housing more affordable over your preference on shadows! It's a negative externality, yes, but it's a trivial one next to the upside of cheaper housing for more people!
So there has to be a line. Different people just draw the line differently. For me the issue on shadows is that these fancy buildings make the streets next to them dark and ghetto-like.