861–870 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't. I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman th…
We don't need to explain how they do it. We KNOW private equity is expecting to make profit from their investment in residential real estate. That profit ultimately comes from people in houses, making them less affordable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's overly reductive. I was hoping that the specific commodities weren't going to be the focus, but I guess that was naive. If you're going to use "housing" as an umbrella for its substitutes, let me do the same. Instead of wheat, beef, pork, cocoa, sugar, etc, let's call that "food". So now food is as essential as housing. Why doesn't the housing complaint against speculators work for food speculators?
The argument is either intellectually dishonest or you just really haven't thought this through very deep and are just puppeting this neoliberal bullshit. We could start with I have traded wheat futures and could hedge with future contracts on all those commodities. You can't trade single family home derivatives in the same way because it is not the same. This is unthinking market religion stupidity and the result is…
And you're claiming that the reaction to opposing state control and socialism is socialism? Not compelling.
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…
Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.
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…
As others have pointed out housing markets are illiquid and tend to have a limited set of sellers at any given time such that the race-to-the-bottom doesn’t happen very often.
Rather, an institutional investor buys high on houses in desired neighborhoods then charge high rents on their portfolio. Subsequent sellers in the same neighborhood see the high closing price and ask for even more.
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…
Renting should be viewed is a negative in society. Imagine if car dealerships moved to a rental model instead of ownership..oh wait, they sort of already are, they just call it "financing", they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion. Rent income is not wages, that's the critical part you're mistaken. Income and wages are not the same thing. Rent income is as much wages as Elon Musk selling…
This is completely false. This might be surprising to learn, but for normal car dealerships (not buy-here, pay-here or used car dealerships) a huge amount of their compensation rides on receiving holdback payments from manufacturers, as well as per-unit bonuses that often have cliffs.
Cash buyers paying invoice price are welcomed (if they aren't too big of a headache) because they push a dealership over or at least closer to the next sales-volume bonus cliff.
Holdback alone is worth more than any realistic origination fee.
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.
> 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 I have a hard time believing lots of people care to do that - not many take steps for privacy - or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.
Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.
Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.
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…
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…
As long as houses are treated as an investment, there will be all kind of incentives to make them go up in value. China did "over" solve it by building loads of houses, so everyone's house value just crippled down like crazy. If buying a house delivers 5–10× the ROI of the S&P 500, that’s not “smart investing” then there is a huge problem to be addressed ... (preferably by building more)
That's not really a bad thing unless you believe real estate should be a vehicle for investment. However, in T1 and T2 cities asset prices are roughly on par with western major metro areas. However, property management fees tend to be lower. I suspect the Hukou system contributes significantly to keep housing affordable, and it's not just the massive supply.