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

91–100 of 1001 posts

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

#91

Post by Aurornis »

tbrownaw wrote: post #76
Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

> because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor. Oh I thought the one extremely obvious way was to fix local policy roadblocks. After all, it's not like a lacking supply of housing is a new issue they suddenly appeared out of nowhere within the last dozen month…

> After all, it's not like a lacking supply of housing is a new issue they suddenly appeared out of nowhere within the last dozen months.

The main lumber and building materials tariffs went into effect January 1st 2026.

If you thought the current situation was bad, it's only going to get worse.

This announcement is a distraction to get people blaming Wall Street. It's a "look over there!" announcement literally days after they raised tariffs to make a bad situation worse.

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

#92

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Those "few metro areas" are on the scale of 10s of millions of houses. Remember that the top 10 largest cities have a third of the US population in it.

>because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing:

Cheaper housing doesn't mean that institutions won't still try to buy it up.

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

#94

Post by sgerenser »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #66
Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein,…

Not sure about $10,000 houses (that would be pretty spartan, even Tiny Homes usually cost more than that), but the $2500 car thing being due to lenders is completely off base. The reason there are no $2500 cars is that it's impossible to make one and meet current US safety regulations. Once you meet all of those, then you're already well beyond $2500, but it's still a pretty crappy car. Might as well add a few extra creature comforts that most consumers demand (power locks, power windows, bluetooth/stereo, disc brakes, more than 100HP engine, etc.) and you're never going to be below ~$15K with current parts and labor pricing.

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

#95

Post by kelipso »

TZubiri wrote: post #82
Aurornis wrote: post #42

Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…

Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor. That's quite an extreme political take. A more humble basic economic theory question would be: If you ban large institutional investors f…

Why would you need institutions to finance building new homes? You think the cost of building a home is more than the cost of buying a home? (Obviously not.) Normal people have been building their own homes using their own money for thousands of years.

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

#96

Post by bdcravens »

lif wrote: post #4

What about the many, many thousands of homes that have already been bought up?

IF it results in dramatic reduction of home prices, this sounds great at first, but in actuality, it throws the market into disarray, since many sellers and also buyers, and it may trap home owners who need to sell into bankruptcy.

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

#97

Post by OGEnthusiast »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #62
mc32 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be some nuance. Companies are known to either rent of sometimes own housing for personnel who travel to other offices. Universities typically own housing as well. So maybe it’s something like it can’t be one of the main businesses of the corp to buy up residential housing as an investment tool.

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses. > Universities typically own housing as well. I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

> critical subsets of uses

I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.

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

#98

Post by epistasis »

kelipso wrote: post #83
epistasis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of emotionally charged response. Leftists largely don't want corporations owning houses, because it's "impure" and capitalist. Rightists largely don't want renters to live in homes that used to be exclusionary on the basis of being able to buy a home. Though there's crossover on the reasons, of course.

Honestly, the argument on the other side seems like emotionally charged arguments due to TDS and not wanting to give Trump any credit. It seems obvious to most people that institutional investors should not be allowed near single family homes and you would need quite a strong argument to persuade otherwise.

Which side is TDS and why? I've heard both of these opinions expressed quite freely over the past few years, without any association with Trump. However, most instances of TDS seem to not "derangement" but "normal human emotion to me."

> It seems obvious to most people that institutional investors should not be allowed near single family homes

What is obvious about this? They have always invested in single family homes. Can you provide a priniciple or rationale? If it's something other than renters or "corporations bad but I won't explain further" then I'd love to hear it!

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

#99

Post by gsibble »

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…

Yeah, that's why Blackstone's stock fell 9% on this news. It doesn't affect them at all.

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

#100

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

anonymars wrote: post #29
codyb wrote: post #7

Seems reasonable to me, a very anti Trump individual. Now deliver. And which of his buddies does this benefit? I'm trying to think if there will be ramifications to this... - Obviously forced divestment of all Wall St owned single family homes could impact housing prices which is both the point, but of course... also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth - I guess that crash could potentially have people…

> also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth This is part of the crux, isn't it? It's a backbone of families' wealth and positioned as an investment. So there seems to be no winning: either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old See also: Bitcoin and the like (wild value fluctuations are the hallmark of a good currency) Related article of interest: https://archinect.com/news/ar…

> either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old

The simple fact is, housing can either be affordable xor an investment[0].

Affordable means the prices are flat relative to inflation, which makes it a terrible investment. If it's a good investment, that means the price is going up faster than inflation, which quickly makes it unaffordable.

[0] I want to be clear that I'm referring to housing as an investment to mean buying a house purely for profit purposes, ie, to flip or to rent out. Buying a house to live in, rather than renting the house you live in, can be considered an "investment", but I mean to explicitly exclude that usage of "investment" in this comment.

Post reply on HN