We don't build enough housing, so housing becomes a good investment, eventually pricing out everyone except existing investors or people with large assets. We' structured the system so that once you're in you're IN. Leverage, 30yr mortgages, tax deductions all continue to subsidize existing homeowners at the expense of everyone else (who are technically a minority).
If this continues, expect to see more and more radical policy proposals by young people.
For example: rent control
Which doesn't really matter because they don't need to be "protected" in any capacity. Removing their ability to purchase those homes, and letting it get sorted between the people who are "outlawing building homes" and those who want to move there makes more sense.
In this case, by restricting who can buy, you're reducing the demand for housing. Less demand means lower prices. Lower prices mean fewer homes will be built, meaning less supply.
A better scheme would be to lower the costs of home construction by reducing regulations and taxes on them.
The issue with housing affordability is that the market is often prevented from responding to high demand and low supply by regulation. SF is very restrictive with permitting housing construction, despite the incredibly high rents. It's not that the market forces are failing to incentivize housing construction, it's that developers are prevented from responding to market demand.
You're assuming a baseline of a functional market system.
If you have widespread price-fixing between landlords (say, via everyone using the same algorithm service that gives everyone the same recommendation) then rent control isn't introducing a price fix, it's just changing the level of price fixing.
If you can only rent for $X000, but the rent price is fixed to at least $X500, then for you, there might as well be no availability - the landlord is leaving the place vacant due to the price-fixing.
This is called a cartel. The trouble with cartels is enforcing it. Cartel members cheat all the time by selling for less than the cartel price in order to get a larger share of the market. The setup is unstable as the incentives are much like the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Markets are powerful tools--perhaps the most powerful tool we have to shape human interactions. But too many people believe in a sort of market gospel ("Supply Side Jesus"); that market forces are as inevitable and inflexible as the force of gravity. In reality, policy choices shape markets and careful market design can deliver politically-favorable outcomes.
Markets work for us, not the other way around. "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"
I didn't say that. I said "rent control". And yes, remove all regulations on rent.
> unless we want a return to the Gilded Age
The Gilded Age was a time of great prosperity in the US.
In aggregate, sure. (At least compared to times prior.)
How the prosperity was distributed, OTOH...
Consider Jeff Bezos. He was roundly criticized for the profligacy of spending $80 million for his wedding. But look at it another way. He spread the wealth around by paying artisans, workers, craftsmen, photographers, travel agents, hotels, restaurateurs, etc.
Wealth has a distribution in any economy, and the actual distribution is a consequence of the economic system which itself is the aggregate of specific policy decisions.
It's trickled up by regulatory capture, cheating the political system, gerrymandering, and grants to ensure the property class pay little or no taxes and get socialism for the rich while suppressing wages, expanding undocumented workers and 13a exception prison slave labor, encouraging austerity, and neoliberalism.
Now, from a higher level of abstraction, would you rather $80M worth of work be done toward inflating balloons and setting tables for some megarich fuck's wedding? Or would you rather they be doing something that's actually improving society? (And maybe is more fulfilling to them).
No, wrong. Totally wrong. It was a time of immense inequality.
Oddly enough, these days are even worse than then in terms of income and wealth ratios, but different in absolute effects of penury.
Oh ok, so you have a totally wrong understanding of history. Neoliberalism's strongest solider, I see.
You do realize that the average American back then was working insanely long hours -when there was work at all- for meager wages, in horrendous conditions? Perhaps that's what you want to do with your life? Not me.
> remove all regulations on rent.
How would removing all regulations on rent improve this situation? You'd just make landlords even more powerful than they already are. What would prevent them from charging as much as they can get away with, ensuring their tenants remain poor forever? They are knowns to collectively price gouge.
You could temporarily make the situation better by getting rid of these laws and regulations, but over time they would just come back because in a free market the players that get such policies implemented get richer and win.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
“A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground.”
“The sea in the neighbourhood of the islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, which make a great part of the subsistence of the inhabitants. But in order to profit by the produce of the water, they must have a habitation upon the neighbouring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what he can make by the land, but to what he can make both by the land and water. It is partly paid in sea-fish.”
Karl MArx? No, Adam Smith.
Just pay a 75% tax when you do.
If you can find places to make money with those taxes, have at it.
But you’ll stop messing with normal people’s attempts to buy a house for the most part.
If you move a lot, or want to be able to move easily and explore different cities or even neighborhoods within a city, renting is way easier than if you'd have to go through the hassle of buying.
What sucks is when private companies start owning too many houses and they have unfair advantages over regular folks. For example, they have teams of lawyers.
I completely agree, we need homes for rent at reasonable rates.
But I forgot that a lot of the homes that were purchased for investing were purchased to rent out. A 75% tax on the profits from sale wouldn’t help. If it’s 75% on all profits, including rental income, it’ll destroy the rental market.
I can’t think of a decent answer off the top of my head. My suggestion was glib, but it was meant for the pretty easy case of just flipping.
Trying to control how many houses are purchased versus rented, and how you determine a reasonable rent or prevent that from being abused, is a lot harder.
If someone’s a billionaire and wants to play around by buying houses? Is that any better than an investment company doing it for the market?
How do you tell the difference between a rich person buying their third vacation home and buying a house they intend to sell for profit in a year or two through speculation?
Of course, on the other side, I’m aware of companies that own some company housing to let their employees use. How do you tell that from investing?
Maybe since they weren’t really doing it to make money they wouldn’t really care that the tax would be high when they sold it if they made a big profit.
It all gets really sticky. No special taxes gains on your primary residence, may be a lower tax (that 75% of what’s er) on a secondary residence.
But pretty quickly if you have that many houses personally you can probably afford to pay a high tax on gains. You’re not really what we want to optimize the market for anyway.
I just guessed at a big number. Maybe it should be 50%. Maybe it should be 90%. I have no idea. It seems like it should be legal, there have got to be cases where it might be useful. Buying and flipping houses from dilapidated neighborhood by turning it into something better.
I’m at the age where I wouldn’t mind a house. But they’re all gigantic, expensive, or both in my area. I have no idea how a normal family is ever supposed to afford one.
And unlike Boomers, corporations can live forever. Permanently raising the ladder.
That may be an aggregate and long term effect, but i’ve never seen anyone actually motivated by something like that.
At least not statistically.
People with excess money (often dentists, doctors, middle managers, small business owners, etc), who don’t trust stocks or the banks, are buying houses because they think they can rent them to people for cashflow in the future (aka not have to eat dogfood!), or rent them out now to other people for money. People that otherwise couldn’t be in these houses, or those people would be buying them instead.
Aka put their money to work.
IMO, people doing that right now are going to lose their shirts, but that is risk/reward. I could be wildly wrong.
I would prefer they deregulate the living shit out of constructing additional housing so all the small money can get into that (i.e. something productive instead of literal rent seeking) instead but I am not hopeful.
First, states like RI are already making incremental steps toward it (they have started taxing non owner occupied non rented properties above a threshold, mainly to get the billionares with fancy waterfront vacation real estate to either live in the places or rent them out). It's only a matter of moving that stuff down the economic ladder.
Second, all the "people oughta hang for this" quality legal precedent that enables. If you own a parcel and the government passes a bunch of laws saying you can't do things to the parcel going forward without jumping through economic non-starter sized hoops is that not a taking? They're basically forcing you to sell out to a developer big enough to jump through the hoops like in that supreme court case, only instead of a named developer it's basically a class of developers. And that's considered "not a taking". Straight up taxation is even less of a taking by comparison.
I'd be much more in favor of the taxation if it weren't for all the laws preventing small time land owners and speculators from developing on a scale and budget that befits them but if new punitive taxes get passed without rolling back all sorts of other regulation it's probably very bad for them.
Real estate always goes through these cycles.
I’m sure every person and corporation has some reason for buying homes in excess, but it’s still wrong because homes and land are limited resources that people need to live.
And every month, a percentage of that useable and desirable land comes up for sale, meaning it’s previous owner occupiers are voluntarily moving, and a new owner, if they chose, could redeploy the land in a way that provides homes to many more people, while not evicting anyone.
Unfortunately, each of these cities has also made it illegal for this transition to happen, mandating that the only way you’re allowed to build larger buildings, (if at all) is by demolishing another large (and occupied) building first.
We should change that!
Electronics are made in a factory. Houses are expensive because land near cities and work is scarce.
We can manufacture as much floorspace as we need. We can even manufacture floorspace in factory!
The parent comment suggests that the cost of investing is not high enough. Moreover, they suggest that it should not only be a higher cost, but that this cost should be redistributive.
So I guess I’m a little cautious about just making it flat out illegal. I don’t know enough about the market to know if that would really be a problem.
So I suggested a tax high enough to make it extremely undesirable to do. I figure the net effect will be to stop it.
30% of homes are not sitting empty, cities have a low vacancy rate. Often they rent out and we want low rents too.
He solution is building more or having fewer people on the market for a home through low immigration, and only the former seems politically viable.
"Oh, you can't do that, they'll just pass on the costs to consumers and keep their margins the same! Really, when you raise taxes on the wealthy, the only people you're hurting are the little people!!"
But evidence doesn't bear that out. Real economics are more complex than that, and especially given how things are right now, people can't afford more expensive homes, so trying to pass on additional costs is going to sharply reduce your available market.
Ok. Good.
That’s why we have to make it high enough. If you put a 10% tax on them they’ll just raise rents 10% (or more). I agree.
If you put a 75% tax on them, they’ll have to charge so much money that they’ll have a very hard time getting renters at all. Pretty soon that property is useless to an investor, but can be sold to a normal person and work just fine.
—
My suggestion was actually designed for just buying houses in hopes of reselling them. Buying them for rentals had not occurred to me, but I do know that’s a very common thing. It should have.
If the tax is high enough that you can’t make the business case work out, they won’t do it. And since it doesn’t apply to home owners on a primary residence that house is still perfectly good for anyone who would like to live there.
The cost of investment increases, so to keep the profits investors increase the rent, less people can afford it so the demand for rent decreases and investors sell houses. The supply of housing increases (I agree this is quite convoluted way to increase housing supply) and prices drop. Top cohort of renters can now afford to buy a house, and the bottom cohort is... fucked?
My only point was that its a supply issue not really a tax issue. Houses already have tax on them called property tax its small yes but the reason investors are buying houses is not because the tax is small but because the demand for them is extremely high and the supply is very low. Adding a tax does not in any way fix the demand imbalance. This is why things like price controls only create shortages the problem is that its impossible to build houses because of nimbism.
A Tax doesn't make more houses exist even without investors there isn't enough houses because of local zoning and protesting prevents cheap housing from entering the market. A Tax that does not solve this problem still means that there are to many people buying / renting chasing to few houses.
Make it 100.
I’m not in the real estate industry so I’m sure there’s things I don’t know about.
So I picked a really big number to dissuade it, but left open the possibility.
The average person who owns a second home for rental purposes is highly motivated to get that home rented out, even if it means lowering the rent to attract a renter, because it can be financially ruinous to pay for the taxes and an upkeep if it stays empty.
“I own one home, and am buying a house”
“That makes you an investor”
“No that’s whack. When I buy a third - buying while owning two - then I will be an investor”
You have an off-by-one error.
(I’m speaking only of the investors that buy to rent extract, I have no insight into the flippers)
Why should that be a thing? More cheesy obfuscation games to protect some random a-hole?
These rich who don’t want to be on the hook for other’s healthcare sure make a lot of demands of everyone else.
Covid just taught us we can stand to shed a few million and be fine. Purge the rich.
If no one else is on the hook for my life story fuck theirs.
The fourth estate, the one that we ostensibly trust to hold power to account, again very conveniently, does not generally have that standing, FOIA excepted.
You know, all that good stuff.
Why let the rentier class grow any larger than they already are?
It's not like there is an oversupply of desirable housing. And even if there were an oversupply, the answer isn't to incentivize the rich to get richer.
- a well off family who buys a 2nd home to make sure their kids are set
- a group of well off investors who pool funds, buys a 2nd home, with intention to "flip" it in the next 1-2 years and make 10%
Both are "investors", but I'd like to think the 1st are trying to build a better future, whereas the 2nd are just arbitraging.
Like what are you going to do with your 5th home???
Are PE firms worse landlords than mom-and-pop landlords?
As a hypothetical, you could tax their purchase at the same rate at which they're borrowing and use the funds to back loan guarantees for new/lower income purchasers.
The point is to impair the ROI for multi-home purchasers without limiting upside in the market.
Want to keep your toll business? Build more housing.
Cost cutting in my town for profits that go away just drains the local's pockets. If you want free market rules to apply, then profits going out of the town/city should be taxed harder to promote local businesses and community.
Note that I did not propose forbidding investment, just having rules to help make sure final ownership ends in people (who ideally live there and don't own other 10+ homes).
I'm just making sure that investments don't fuel a system where regular people can't own, but only rent forever, paying past the investment and a healthy interest for their lending, planning and doing service.
Why do road and other infrastructure investments can get these limited profit kind of terms for governments, but housing can't get similar ones for the people?
When the status quo is already extreme (re: property ownership), the appropriate response will seem even MORE extreme because we've gotten used to that opposite one.
We have a housing shortage. As long as it looks like the shortage will continue, investors--people--will buy depreciating assets in the hopes that population growth will cause them to be worth more tomorrow than they are today. If it's not Private Equity, it'll be rental companies. If it's not rental companies, it'll be mom & pop landlords. If it's not mom & pop landlords, it'll be people looking for a second home or pied-a-terre with upside potential. The problem is the perpetual shortage clearly indicating increasing economic rents, instead of a trend toward the cost of production.
This is a housing crisis but most Americans are treating it like a housing whoopsie. We treat it with kid gloves, where we fight about the "correct" way to build just enough housing, in just the right places, instead of pointing a firehouse of development incentives, to the point of literally subsidizing private development and public development.
It's basic economics, but our electorate will tie itself in knots to make the housing crisis fit their niche political narrative.
And now you can say "yes, but ending those will cause a crash in house prices, which will hurt a lot of people, a lot of owners", which is true, but anything you do to change house prices will cause that hurt.
In a way you can look at it as the usual problem: governments effectively sold houses, handing out cash to constituents for votes and power, and now they want, maybe even need, them back. They can't pay to get them back. That's what the argument is about. If the government wanted to buy back houses the way everyone else has to play, by paying market price, nobody would be arguing much. Because of how property taxes work, even if governments crash the housing market, say by ending mortgage guarantees, governments will lose a lot of money they have already spent.
And the fundamental problem is not the division of houses, but how many there are. Crashing house prices is only part of the problem. They need to be torn down and rebuilt denser if you want to make any difference. That also needs to be paid for.
This is the most interesting point. With the current birthrate, what will these homes be worth in 30, 40 years, when depopulation is ongoing? Prices will drop, and so will supply. Look to Japan, deaths of all towns that are not major cities, I expect that to occur in the US
As long as people keep having babies in excess of the replacement rate, housing will always be good investment. They don’t make any more land, and the earth is, frankly, full.
> As long as people keep having babies in excess of the replacement rate
To reiterate, the thread was about "breeding". The birth rate has fallen behind.
You are referring to the overall population growth being due to immigration. This may be true, but is unrelated. Respond to the post about why overpop is driving the housing pricing, not to the factual corrections.
The birth rate for immigrants in america is still quite positive, and has more than offset the low birth rate from ‘non-immigrants’.
The trend is clear. The outliers from 2024 onward (which are pretty big outliers) are likely due to data not being curated correctly. The administration would be to blame for that. The US is faring better than most other western nations specifically because of immigration, so the political environment will likely have a negative downward pressure on that benefit.
Births for immigrants are not counted separately. Again, the birth rate is the topic (which includes immigrant births). Granted, all kinds of residents have births outside of hospitals, but that's a tiny minority that is not counted.
This focus on immigrant vs non-immigrant is more noise in the wrong thread.
It may very well also be that the way we're organizing people means they can't live densely and that's why it's full. Regardless it's full enough that there's almost no place for young people in the US economy.
And whether there's a place for young people in the economy is not what's under discussion here.
Average house size was about 1000 sqft in the 1900 and average household size was 5. This remained relatively the same in 1950 where the average household size was 4. These days, the average size of a house is 2600sqft and household size is 3. We have created a system where we build fewer larger houses. This is because policy (often dictated by people who already own houses) makes it impossible to build small high density housing or even if it is possible to build it, it’s not profitable.
[0] https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/real-estate-investors-re...
Ithaca recently got an ordinance to encourage alternative dwelling units (ADU, aka "granny flats") but boy was it a knock-down drag-out because so many people were up in arms about AirBNB conversions and Private Equity getting involved in buying and building properties. As I'm seeing it Ezra Klein's "Abundance" theme is closely linked to Matt Stoller's "antitrust" theme both in the sense that monopolies are one reason "why nothing works" and that anger at them is dominating the public imagination.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/97813...
https://www.norden.org/en/publication/power-communication-an...
Abstract >Traditional corporatist mechanisms in the Nordic countries are increasingly challenged by professionals such as lobbyists, a development that has consequences for the processes and forms of political communication. Populist political parties have increased their media presence and political influence, whereas the news media have lost readers, viewers, listeners, and advertisers.
YC used to be about investing in potential millennialist monopolies like AirBnB/Stripe/Coinbase/sama, though these days they lobby for the small businesses & the small cities (SF) :)
It’s a bad cycle as lobbying spending will convince harder than people not being able to afford homes.
Not private equity, not 'tHe ChINesE' (or whichever 'bad' foreigners are currently in vogue), but wealthy local NIMBYs.
The inability of people (specifically ex-soldiers) to acquire land and make a living provided a platform for Julius Caesar to take control of Rome and effectively end the Republic.
Note that this was pre-planned. They had a little graphic overlay prepared for this and everything. Probably a dozen people laid eyes on this and they didn't catch it. If you're a functioning human, your gut-level understanding of the world should have caught this. It would be like reporting that the weather in phoenix this weekend will be 327 degrees F.
It reminds me of my dad's story of watching about the moon landing on TV from Bangladesh. The guy next to him said he didn't believe it, because "how did they break through the dome of the sky?" That's what American reporters are like with statistics and economics.
The rocket had a sharp point on the top.
That is, if I start hallucinating citations it’s fair to compare me to AI!
The "how" of it doesn't matter. Could be changes to taxation, investment rules, foreign buyers, whatever. The point is that no matter what, for housing to stop getting more expensive faster than people's incomes, it has to be a bad investment.
Right now, in Australia, housing is a fantastically good investment, earning ludicrous incomes for people basically doing nothing but sitting on some property. It has created a new social class of the "landed gentry" that can earn income without usefully contributing to the economy.
The new nobility will not give this up willingly.
I need to look up Alan Kohler
So every topic we talk about seems to dissolve into some detailed complaint about how the system is screwing over people and it makes my parents uncomfortable. But then I can't talk about my work since it's too technical (and mind-numbing) for them so I literally have nothing else to talk about since I work all the time. I can't discuss politics because they think everything is fine politically. I picked up some outdoor hobbies so thankfully I have that to talk about; at least until my workload increases and salary drops to the point that I don't have time for hobbies anymore and can't afford to go on holidays.
The class divide is so strong, my life's goal shifted from "become a tech millionaire" to "try to save a deposit for an apartment" to now "just survive 30 years". If I can survive 30 years, I will become noble and I will finally understand what it feels like to be happy.
But because I'm a peasant and constantly stressed with a horrible workaholic lifestyle doing unfulfilling work, I think there's a possibility I'll die before my parents. I try to teach my toddler son about the importance of money. I had my son quite late because I couldn't afford to have a child sooner. Also, because I'm poor, my wife is quite a bit older than me (only noble men can afford younger wife these days). I worry my son won't understand the importance of money so I wrote letters for him in case he ends up inheriting at a young age to explain how money works and how horrible my life has been without money and how corrupt the system is and that real friends cannot exist in this system because people are always trying to get your money or securing their own money and that money is the most important thing. I explain to everyone around me how the government has made it illegal to be homeless and to exist without money, even if you perfect your wilderness survival skills, rangers will literally find you in the forest and arrest you if you refuse to vacate. I already started planning with my wife how we're going to get him married into money when he is older.
My parents always said that it's bad to spoil a child; that you have to be firm with a child; "when you say no, it means no" kind of thing. I couldn't disagree more nowadays. I started teaching my son that if he throws a tantrum bad enough, for long enough, I will give him what he wanted. Because he needs to know what being a jerk pays off and he needs to demand what he wants. Also, I prioritize his confidence above everything else.
My experience is; if you get lucky, you might meet someone who will stay with you even without money, but you basically have to live through trauma together, to create that kind of bond. I feel like only extreme traumatic hardship can keep people together when they don't have money.
Some rich people feel jealous of poor people "This guy is dirt poor and yet his wife stayed with him." but they're missing the fact that these two people probably share so much trauma that it's very difficult to relate to anyone else after that. They stay together because they literally lack alternatives; nobody else can possibly understand their pain. Which is the core of their identity. It's not pleasant at all. Also, it's almost impossible to make new friends when you're poor for the same reason. You can't relate to anyone. People get rich for a small number of reasons (it's a unifying experience) but people get poor for a million different reasons which feels like falling through hundreds of different invisible cracks (it's a divisive experience).
Being poor, every time I do something unnecessary like small talk or making a joke, I feel unnatural and fake. At a profound level, I don't understand how it's possible to have friends 'just for fun'. Everything I do must have a path towards money. I feel guilty otherwise. I could have spent this time practicing my coding or writing skills or earning money.
It has taken me nearly 20 years to understand why I feel this way. It is painful and unnecessary.
It's not just the nobility, it's also the Australian economic system itself. Australia's GDP is built on asset inflation and the housing market - I find numbers between 10% to 25% of Australia's GDP being based on housing.
If the Australian government stops the boomer money train they might crash the GDP, which in turn will negatively affect Australia's borrowing capacity, which will negatively impact (crash?) the economy.
Edit: the obvious solution is to diversify Australia's economy, away from digging holes and building houses. Economists have been shouting this from the roof-tops for years now and I have seen little political will to actually make this happen, the easy-money-train is just too good.
So it's possible we get to a point where a minority of the people own enough housing that the rest just vote to say fuck 'em.
The rentier class has tools to prevent such coordinated voting. They divide us with scare tactics on fringe issues, religion, encourage over identifying with things/movements/celebrities, etc.
I'm afraid things would have to fundamentally and undeniably bad to rally enough people to change things. It's amazing how much folks with overlook or rationalize if given an effective distraction, like fear or hate.
The "rentier class" in question here is a bunch of slumlords who own a few apartments as part of an LLC they have with their buddies and boomers who have retired to their vacation home and are AirBnBing their former primary residence, not Blackrock and friends, big money only owns a small fraction of property. The average landlord is some other middle or upper middle class schmuck.
From the article:
> Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85%
Mid sized and large real estate investors make of most of the rest. PE firms account for 0.5-2% of the market.
*edit anyone downvoting this should make an effort to refute what I’m saying with some facts.
> Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties, while those with between 6 and 10 properties account for another 5%.
> Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.
> ...
> Out of a group of eight of the biggest companies that own and lease single-family houses, including Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, six sold more homes in the second quarter than they bought ...
SO - how many of those mom-and-pop investors are mostly buying homes as investments? Vs. how many are building a well-to-do lifestyle, with a "cabin on the lake up north", and "winter condo in Florida"? (Or buying homes for their less-well-to-do children, maybe with some inheritance tax dodges baked in?)
EDIT: The issue with "investor" is here:
> Nearly 27% of all homes sold in the first three months of the year were bought by investors -- the highest share in at least five years, according to a report by real estate data provider BatchData.
How much does BatchData actually know about the finances and lifestyles of the "mom-and-pop" buyers which it has labeled as "investors"? (Vs. "developers", or "fixer-uppers", or multi-home lifestylers, vs. ...)
I don't think we can tell.
*inner Minnesotan twitching*
I know a lot of people who have struggled to find homes to rent when they need to move to a new city with a family for a shorter-term job like a year or two. All the homes available are for sale, none are to rent.
If it's to rent, it's not taking any living space off the market.
And with elevated mortgage rates, it could be smart for people to rent now rather than buy, waiting to buy until interest rates come down.
But it's not "pure corporate". Quite the opposite. From the article:
> mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties, while those with between 6 and 10 properties account for another 5%.
I really don't see anything wrong with mom and pop buying a second or third home to rent out for extra income.
And I don't see anything inherently wrong with 27% either. If there aren't enough rental homes, then an increase in the share of investors is exactly what you need to achieve the "reasonable balance" you're talking about. And then there's nothing bad about it -- it's exactly what's best.
That is not what's best; it just concentrates more money in the hands of the investors.
No, not necessarily. If there's enough competition for renters, then the homeowner may have to rent at a loss. Renting at a loss is still preferable to no collecting rent at all. Getting $90 on a $100 investment is bad, but better than getting $0 on a $100 investment.
It's literally the opposite. More rental properties means more rental supply which means lower rental prices.
> But if they are competing against investors, putting more money into the demand side, the price that renters actually pay is pushed towards their potential limit.
You're confusing buy demand with rental demand.
2. Keeping houses off market and renting them for a profit is a bad thing as it is harvesting the money the renters could be putting to the side to buy a house AND hikes the price of houses, making it even harder for renters to become owners.
Can't your friend buy and then sell when they are ready to move?
2. In general, rent payments are less than mortgage payments for the same property (though this can vary in specific cases due to a number of factors). So the point is the renters get to save more money than they would with a mortgage.
And the problem with buying and selling is the realtor fee on both ends. You can't buy and sell a house every year or two. You'd go broke real quick.
This didn't seem true to me - Anecdotally, my friends pay more in rent for apartments than I do for my mortgage on a single-family home in my area.
Then I googled it, and turns out my city is one of the top five US cities with the highest ratio of renting vs owning cost, and indeed a place where it costs nearly twice as much to rent as it does to own.
Which is exactly where the supply and demand is out of whack. But fortunately, the more people buy places to rent out, the cheaper it becomes to rent.
The renters in your area would love if investors bought a ton of properties and rented them out, increasing supply and therefore bringing down rates! And if rents are really 2x mortgage payments, then there should be tons of people lining up to do so, since it's basically just free money lying around. The invisible hand and everything.
2.Nearly half of renters in the USA are cost burdened (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/renter-h...).
It is mental gymnastics to say that renters are saving by renting.
And about realtor fees, that sure would affect my decision to move or not. Or to rent an appartment/condo, which is almost always possible, especially in urban centers.
2. And lots of homeowners are cost-burdened too. What's your point? The US is an expensive place for everything. Mortgage rates are crazy expensive now too.
It's not mental gymnastics to say you can save by renting. There are lots of online calculators where you can see the places in the US where it's cheaper to rent than to buy.
And sometimes you have to move for a job, period. And families don't always want to rent an apartment, they want to rent a house with a backyard, you know?
2. If a homeowner has more than one property, why not sell one of the properties when you become cost burdened? Also, I think at some point you stop paying a mortgage, right? I don't think that's the case with renting.Oh and it's a neat financial tool too, a mortgage.
So yeah renters would be better off owning, other than in some niche situations.
I don't understand what brings people to move for jobs if the salary doesn't make housing trivial for them. You're saying people on a 50k salary will move cities rather than change jobs?
Edit0: and that link I sent earlier that you probably didn't open shows that renters on average pay 30% of income on housing, while owners with mortgages paid 20% and 10% without a mortgage. Renters are the in the absolute worst situation however you want to cut it.
And no, renters are not better off owning, except in "niche situations". I genuinely don't know where you've gotten that idea. It depends highly on your local market, but on average renting is cheaper than owning, and it frees up a lot of money that can be invested more productively.
You seem to have some kind of prejudice against renting, which I genuinely don't understand. And your concept that the cost of housing ought to be "trivial" for people to move is incredibly unsympathetic. An assistant professor will move for a better chance of getting tenure. For a fellowship. For whatever. A lot of people can't just "change jobs". They have training for a specific niche, and often advancing their career requires moving to a different city, full stop.
Edit0: actually, your point was about "buying properties to rent", but you're talking about the avg investor "renting until they sell". I can see a massive distinction, as some properties are rentals their whole lifetimes, and some are only in parts while trying to sell them. But you seem to propose that all investors are waiting to sell and "bought to rent"?
2.You can write things and those things not be factual y'know? You can just say that renting is the best choice for most, while I've provided you evidence yo the contrary, whoch you lovingly ingored twice now. Census.gov is very biased, I know.
I've rented every single day of my adult life, it's not something I'm prejudiced against, whatever you might think that means.
It is crystal clear to me and anyone I know who rents: renting is more expensive than owning, and owning a dwelling is a life goal for most people.
I really don't understand your position - other than trying to justify your own investments to yourself.
That's too bad for them. As a plant worker in manufacturing, I wish them to find everything that makes them happy - and recommend getting a union job.
Edit1: What's the line again? You will own nothing and be happy?
And when you say "It is crystal clear to me and anyone I know who rents: renting is more expensive than owning", your crystal clarity is wrong, sorry. I haven't responded to your census.gov link because it's irrelevant. You can be "cost-burdened" renting even while renting is cheaper than a monthly mortgage would be. The link doesn't have anything to do with the discussion here. But if you don't want to google it, here are literally the first two links I got when searching for whether it's cheaper to rent or buy:
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/rent-vs-buy-affordabili...
https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/buying-a-home/renting-...
The first line of the first link:
> On average, renting a home is cheaper than paying a mortgage in all 50 of the largest U.S. metros in 2025 — with the cost difference between the two growing in 38 metros since last year.
Hope that helps you understand not "my position" but just the facts. And I truly can't imagine why you'd tell someone seeking tenure to get a union job instead. I don't see how that could come across as anything but insulting, to tell them they should pick a job more like yours.
They can, but because of realtors these 2 transactions will end up costing 12% of the cost of the house.
I've not had a job where I moved for the salary/advantages, but I imagine I would only do so if the conpensation made it so that 12% fee seemed negligeable.
The implication is that this drives up the price for renters, because the demand side includes not just money from people seeking a place to live, but much larger amounts of money from other markets.
The implication of these article is always that investors are somehow unfairly competing against homeowners. But there is only one fixed pool of people competing for housing - something that reduces supply for buyers is increasing it for tenants and vice versa.
There's a fixed pool of ppl who need housing (aka the entire population of the country) and a relatively fixed pool of interior floorspace to divvy up among them.
Whether each person chooses to/prefers to/is forced to rent or buy is not the driving force behind rent and price changes
Rents & prices are moving because the amount of floorspace that exists (in places people want to live) is much lower than the aggregate amt of floorspace people would like there to be. Each month, everyone who needs to buy/sell/rent is forced to play a game of musical chairs. If you don't have a lot of $, you are going to be one of the people w/no chair, and be forced to leave.
In any normal market this would trigger vast increases of floorspace (or chair) manufacturing, but in the anglosphere we have convinced ourselves that there is only one true way to live - in a square box with a triangle on top - and we forbid almost every other form on most land, making it extremely difficult to increase the # of chairs.
If 28% of sellers that quarter were investors then the owner occupancy rate went up.
Now I suspect that’s not the case but if you look at home ownership rates for non-investors they stay in a very tight couple of % points in the mid 60s and they track interest rates. This has been true since the US started making home ownership a governmental priority post ww2.
Prior to that it was in the 40s for as far back as I could find any data.
When houses become an investment, that's when you start screwing young people! And it stops being an asset if you just simply build more
Let them keep buying. But if we build enough, they won't be able to rent it all out. Are they going to keep buying to control the rent-able supply forever? No, they'll run out of money before we run out of buildable land. (Maybe not before we run out of wood, shingles, and labor though...)
Why not just prevent private companies from buying homes they don't use, and force them to sell the ones they are currently holding?
"Prevent private companies from buying homes they don't use" is going to be a really hard sell legally. (Though, to be fair, changing zoning laws seems also to be a really hard sell...)
Downvote all you want, but math is math.
Land prices rise with income. Through all places in all points of history.
The solution is a land value tax.
land value is only a small part of housing costs.
LVT doesn't require any such determination.
Anyway, I'm not opposed to the solution you mention as well. We should subsidize supply of housing, and supply at any price will serve the same purpose of driving prices down, so yes I agree we should build public housing for higher price points.
to be clear, regulations is part of the problem in some markets but not everywhere. how are local regulations causing a housing crisis everywhere? this problem is happening everywhere, and local municipalities across the country didn't coordinate to cause this.
they stopped building after GFC bc it was too risky. market dynamics, the profit incentive, and now the cost for labor + material + borrowing costs is the problem.
this is a better solution: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/07/nx-s1-5119633/housing-crisis-...
> this is a better solution
His company goes into neighborhoods that are often struggling, buy houses for cash, gut them, then rent them.
They have a lot of buying leverage, because there's no mortgage to deal with. They just slap down the cash.
That's one way that higher interest rates cause problems. It's hard to compete with someone that can hand you a cashier's check for $500,000.
I suspect that the Bay Area is even worse.
The buildings being bought are 2-4 unit apartment rental buildings, and quite old, so 300-500k is typical. Then they're downzoned into single family homes or possibly two condos and resold for about double the price I think.
Obviously the ones using (and then losing) them as rental housing and the ones buying are completely different groups.
The homes investors would look to pick up to flip and sell or rent would go in the $80-120 range in this area, I'd think.
Cash is more secure, when you turn down a bunch of offers for one that goes belly-up, at the end.
But to me, this kind of corporate, large scale buy-out of residential property is immoral and dangerous to our society.
They tell themselves they're increasing liquidity in the market or that they're helping people who can't afford to buy, have a place to rent.
It's just excuses for taking advantage of a situation, and I wish what your friend did was against the law (or else regulated into oblivion) so regular people could afford a home in cities.
If you want to make it so no homes get built at all your proposal seems like a good starting point.
Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.
And that number could get smaller, amid signs that large institutional investors are scaling back home purchases.
Out of a group of eight of the biggest companies that own and lease single-family houses, including Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, six sold more homes in the second quarter than they bought, according to data from Parcl Labs."
https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
I wish everyone who cares about the cost of housing could go to a hearing like that. It's a huge eye opener.
Also, here's a good debunking of investors being some kind of root cause rather than a symptom of housing that is scarce: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-cr...
> Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties
In my social circle, if you are going to buy a new house, you are doing everything you can to keep your current house while purchasing the second. It is the clearest path to retirement from traditional 40hr/week employment for the people around me.
> Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.
Talking about these two cohorts in the same article may be problematic as they such vastly different motives, operating procedures, and (please don't light me on fire) different regulations needed.
That’s fascinating to me. Generally, the homes people buy to live in aren’t optimal investment properties. Why not sell and buy something optimized for return and growth?
But the probable answer is mortgages. If you got a 30 year mortgage for less than 3% you almost certainly want to do anything you can to keep your hands on it. It’s probably the best financial device ever given to the average consumer.
Theres also a chunk of people who “don’t believe in debt” so even when they have kids and live in a house they rent until they can pay cash. Or there’s young people who get together in a group of 4 and rent a house to share etc etc.
When my wife got pregnant we were looking to move to a nicer condo. Rent was so high that an equivalent condo's mortgage payments were lower.
We had the down payment saved up so it was a no-brainer.
But if you bought a place before the pandemic you could lock in a ridiculously low interest rate for 30 years.
Now you have the value of the mortgage (leverage) locked at an interest rate lower than inflation. Let's say rent covers expenses and mortgage. The return on an initial $50k down on a 250k property might be around $10k/year, or 20%.
Tell me, where does one get an investment returning 20% annum?
Real estate is the easiest and safest way to leverage your investment.
Great question and one I wrestled with until hearing Paula Pant's perspective:
You _really_ know the house you already own. You have a much better understanding of its issues and capital expenses in the next 1-5 years, than a house you are purchasing with an inspection. You know the yard, the neighbors, the city regs, the roof, the plumbing, the weird dog two doors down, and the weirder neighbor three doors down. The mom and pop investor have a much greater risk-of-ruin on a single property than an institutional investor, so this knowledge is extremely valuable.
The second reason is you most likely purchased that house with a non-investment mortgage, so you get priced in a bit to converting to an investment property after the living in it. My non-owner occupied mortgages for my investment properties required 30-35% down and had a much higher interest rate. Converting your existing home avoids all that.
Thirdly, taxes. Selling a house triggers a taxable event and with investment properties will heavily push the seller towards a 1031 exchange to avoid a hefty tax bill that year. A 1031 basically requires you to pick 3 specific properties when your property closes with a requirement to purchase one of those three in the immediate six months or face a capital gains bill is a hard bill to swallow. Depending on the state in the United States, purchasing a new property will also reset your property tax bill, while an existing property can have property taxes well below the current rate based solely on property values when purchased.
Honestly makes me wish I’d had better advice when we traded up. And I also ignored the “you’re keeping the old house right?” from a few relatively wise friends. Should’ve asked follow-up questions.
Does this happen anywhere outside of California?
Climate change isn’t going to be stopped. Don’t get tied to some dirt that’ll be inhospitable before too long. And houses are generally full of obsolete crap anyway, like bad electric wiring, rooms without ethernet, and big empty rooms that need to be inefficiently climate controlled.
Tech folks should really lead the way on this. If you are remote and have a high wage, why don’t you live in some futuristic RV off in some idyllic countryside?
I’d definitely say it wasn’t ideal, the waste situation was certainly not great without a septic tank hook-up! But it is a something that can be iterated on. NIMBYs, on the other hand, there just isn’t any traction there at all.
It's like all the UBI tests. It's not meaningful if the participants know the UBI will stop after a certain period.
--
"Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties, while those with between 6 and 10 properties account for another 5%.
Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.
And that number could get smaller, amid signs that large institutional investors are scaling back home purchases.
Out of a group of eight of the biggest companies that own and lease single-family houses, including Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, six sold more homes in the second quarter than they bought, according to data from Parcl Labs."
I’d just ignore people with one home because they are not investors. Have one “mom and pop” bucket for people with 2 homes, one rented out, and then another bucket for businesses with 3+ homes, 2+ rented out.
Edit: Oh nevermind, they included individuals owning 1-99 houses buying rental properties as investors making institutional investors more like 2.2% (of the 27%) much more in line with what I would have guessed.
[1]https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/newressales.pdf
Also, mom and pops owners shouldn’t get a free pass here, as the quality of life plummets with renters.
Most other investments are fractional, meaning there's a pool of the same asset available to many investors and your purchase doesn't necessarily limit their opportunity. But when you're "investing" in your first home, it's not a decision between safe or unsafe investments, debt or equity (or crypto) - it's a combination of needs and wants. And oftentimes you're in direct competition with someone who wants to make the same investment.
In this case, losers are forced to reallocate more of their income to cover rents and winners are alleviated of that same burden. When the winner is an investor with multiple homes, mom & pop or not, they are claiming the same rents that burden those who have lost their chances to invest because of competition.
Personally, I think people need to start thinking on moral terms when they look to invest their money into rental homes. I've never seen somebody who owns multiple homes actually put any sweat into their equity. At least, none of their own sweat. And rental properties are almost never maintained - they slowly slide into oblivion because every decision is a cash flow decision. When you own the home, the decision to maintain the property reflects personal and social influences, not just long-term returns.
qcic•6mo ago
Not a shocker, given high interest rates usually drive down prices, and investors are not getting mortgages. Great investment to keep value, not so much for growth.
howinator•6mo ago
qcic•6mo ago
rightbyte•6mo ago
But anyway, the trend of corparations buying houses is really bad.
breckenedge•6mo ago
> Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.
> And that number could get smaller, amid signs that large institutional investors are scaling back home purchases.
lotsofpulp•6mo ago
rightbyte•6mo ago
cowsandmilk•6mo ago
I don’t know of any real estate investor who doesn’t use mortgages. The norm is interest-only mortgages and not paying down principal at all.