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

What immature peasant-logic people as yourself don’t understand is that no, there is negative net benefit to the common person, while the common American is deprived of that benefit which goes primarily to the richest, and of course the freeloading foreign nationals. Nothing about America has gotten on any controlled measure better without the increase in foreign nationals that have been imposed on the citizens of America against their will.

Is it really as simple as that you have no dignity and are just a self-interested person that enjoys living off the theft of Americans?

And again, your infantile mind cannot seem to grasp that removing a squatter from your home is in fact justified, regardless of how much negative economic impact it would have by depriving that squatter of your assets and living in your home.

Why do you types not understand these basic things? Is it really as basic as that you’re vile? Depraved? Narcissistically callous towards the people you harm? Is it really just because you enjoy making others pay the cost of your decisions while you benefit?

How about we just make you pay for all, every single cost of the foreign nationals that are squatting in America at the profit of the ruling class? Of course not, you would prefer others pay the cost with the misery you cause them.

Presumably you can't just walk up to a bank and say "I'd like finance to buy 10 houses please!" with no collateral beyond the houses you're purchasing?

Here you usually need a 10% deposit. If you already own a house you can borrow against equity. The bank considers multiple houses as a single portfolio to calculate loan to value ratio (LVR), and will take tenants rents into account on affordability. A quick worked example based on local figures (average first home price $700k, average home price $1m):

New market entrant looking for a $700k house: Needs $70k in cash for deposit plus $28k stamp duty, takes $630k loan and now has a 90% LVR and 70k equity.

Existing homeowner with $1m house, bought at $300k some years ago and now has $100k left on their mortgage: Has $900k equity. Takes an interest-only loan against equity for the full $728k on the same 700k house. Total property worth $1.7m, 48% LVR qualifying for a lower interest rate and paying much less per month as they have taken the loan interest-only. Didn't have to save up a single cent to cover deposit or stamp duty. Still has $872k in equity on the two properties so does it again three more times. Buys a total of four investment properties, still comes in under 80% LVR.

If the market goes up another 25%, the new entrant is sitting on $245k equity.

The landlord's IPs are now worth 3.5 million on total debts of 3 million, at which point they can sell four houses, clear all their debts including their original mortgage and pocket $500k (and while capital gains tax is chargeable on sale of investment properties, it's heavily discounted compared to other assets). Or they can use this new equity to buy more houses.

> if you're taking the equity out of your $2M house, how are you servicing that debt?

Rent. There's also a rental crisis going on over here. Rents are really high and can pretty easily cover investor mortgages. There's lots of people who would have been able to buy few years back but can't scrape together the finance to do so now that prices have gone up, who are forced to keep renting. So the investor crush creates its own client base!

Plus if you do end up making a loss on mortgage payments, property upkeep etc, the government allows you to offset that against your all-sources income for tax purposes, potentially reducing that loss by 45% if you're a higher rate earner.

> My point is that it's an awful lot easier to buy 6 $100k houses than it is to buy 6 $2M houses, if houses weren't speculative assets, maybe we wouldn't get those buyers driving up prices.

It kinda isn't in Australia. The market rising makes it much easier to access more debt and leverage that into more houses.

But I very much agree that housing shouldn't be a speculative asset and this market is broken. The government should be putting in place disincentives, not discounts and offsets. Unfortunately established homeowners now see this as a normal way of 'getting ahead' and I know multiple people who are effectively playing monopoly like this.

I hate it. Even though in theory I could go out and buy four or five houses next week if I wanted to. But with the rising cost of living and general bleak economic outlook everyone is continually fed, and the seeming impossibility of 'winning' for the average person, I'm not surprised people do it.

(Yes I was very bored with work this morning....)

The distinction I'm trying to draw is between operating housing as a service and owning housing primarily as a financial asset whose returns are driven by scarcity and leverage.

In a healthier system, the incentive to own rental property would look closer to running a utility or a hospitality business: you earn steady, relatively bounded returns for providing a well-run service (maintenance, risk, capital deployment, tenant experience), not outsized returns from appreciation and from pushing rents faster than incomes.

People would still buy rental properties to earn income, but the business case would be built more on operational efficiency and quality of service, and less on financial engineering, tax advantages, and asset inflation.

Practically, that can show up in a lot of forms that already exist in pieces today: regulated or capped-return rental models, co-ops and shared-equity housing, community land trusts, public-private development, developer-operator splits, or tax structures that favor building and selling over hoarding and rent maximization.

So I'm not saying "don’t make money on rent." I'm saying a system where most of the upside comes from perpetual control of a scarce necessity will naturally concentrate ownership and make entry harder and harder. A system where most of the upside comes from creating, improving, and operating housing can still support rentals while keeping the door open for new owners.

That's what people with disproportionate access to capital would want people to believe. It absolutely matters if there's a ceiling and a floor on the production rate of every aspect of the supply chain of housing. If it doesn't matter how many houses someone owns, then it wouldn't matter if builders don't outpace the ability for particularly wealthy people to borrow and own as much as they possibly can. It's a particular type of commodity that should be appropriately controlled in a way that reduces the whole "tragedy of the commons" type effect.

There's always a finite supply, and there's always some contingent of people who will try and get as much as they possibly can, leveraging as much generational wealth as they need to, if they need to.

There should absolutely be a limit on the number of homes, within a particular region, someone should be able to buy, as long as a sufficient threshold is met for what can reasonably be called a scarcity problem. If an individual average home of any type would require the mean family income to quadruple in order to service the mortage, or the downpayment would require 5x their annual salary pre-tax, that seems like a very liberal threshold.