The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not. Even if every market participant were an individual, that (presumably not overly wealthy) single mother of four is still going to get out-competed.
The only actual solution is to increase supply, which means abolishing the wealthy-favoring laws that make it illegal to build (i.e. the laws mandating things like single-family houses and minimum parking requirements).
Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
I mean sure we can ban institutional investors from buying up houses in your area, but the question is: will new houses stlil continue to be built? or are houses mostly built because the developers intend to sell them to institutional investors that can pay high prices for it?
in any case, the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can’t only ban one without also pushing the other.
Doesn’t matter, because even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated from the bidding, when a dozen buyers with $200k or $300k in buying power are in the market and only one house is for sale because it’s literally illegal for more to be built, only one of you is going to be able to get the house!
I really don’t get your angle. Let’s say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there’s an immediate drop in demand, so the current supply satisfies more individuals. Why are you arguing against this?
Let’s say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there’s an immediate drop in demand
No there is not. Those corporations exist to make profit, and profit (in the long run) only comes from either tenants paying to occupy the house or selling it on to some other owner who will then either occupy it themselves or find tenants of their own. Even if it’s a speculative bubble right now, sooner or later that game of musical chairs has to end and people have to sit down; otherwise they lose.
i think the problem of institutional investors is mostly that they’re unnecessary middle-men, taking a slice of the cake while not actually providing anything of value.
they buy the house, then rent it out to the local population. in the end, they make a profit that way, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. that is money that could have gone into the local community instead.
either you need local middlemen, like the municipality (which i am advocating for!) or people need to buy the houses directly themselves. i remember reading an article that renting is often better for inhabitants since they don’t need to do a down-payment and also they carry less risk that way. also interestingly many can build more wealth by renting+investing instead of house buying. ~~https://www.moneydigest.com/1580083/renting-vs-owning-both-can-help-you-build-wealth-according-to-personal-finance-expert/~~
How many properties is BH sitting on unsold? How many are going to open up with the death of the Boomer homeowner generation?
Between 13.1 million and 14.6 million Boomers are projected to “exit homeownership” between 2026 and 2036. Who will own those homes when they are gone?
it’s literally illegal for more to be built
Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes
We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus. What we lack is jobs paying at the going mortgage rate
There are dumb laws in some places privileging things like sfh over apartments, to the point of exclusion. But more to their point:
i stubbed my toe, so this giant steel I beam that has impaled me is helping actually. I need the ton if steel currently pressing up against my remaining lung and protruding 20 feet in front of and behind me, or i wont be able to walk.
Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes
Just look at any zoning map. It’s all the (usually) yellow parts, i.e. the single-family-zoned areas, which make up the vast bulk of most cities’ residential land area.
We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus.
Sure, in the exurbs nobody actually wants to live in!
Are you claiming that you can’t build homes in a residential neighborhood?
After the lots have already had single-family houses on them and you aren’t allowed to subdivide or replace them with multifamily buildings? Yes! That’s exactly what I’m claiming!
Every single-family house in the close-in parts of the city represents the physical displacement of multiple families that could have lived in that space if it had been a multifamily building instead. Those families are literally forced further out into the suburbs, and then have to commute back in. That’s where the traffic, high prices, lack of walkability, pollution, obesity crisis due to sedentary lifestyles, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum all come from!
I’m getting really sick and tired of you trying to play coy with terminology, or whatever the Hell it is you’re trying to do. Are you really so fucking dense that you’re confused by what I wrote?
It’s illegal to build multi-family (i.e. more housing) in areas zoned for single-family. What part of that did you not understand?
Do you think these investors just have magic unlimited funds to hoard vacant housing forever? No. They exist to make a profit, which means sooner or later they either have to get occupants into those units or sell them on to somebody who will. This “additional” demand from property hoarders who apparently (according to your logic) love vacant buildings because they’re fucking morons who hate money is, in the long run, fictional.
Look, if you want to do something about the investors because of inequality or unfairness or whatever, have at it. I’m just saying that if your goal is to fix housing prices, zoning reform would be vastly more effective as a strategy.
I did the math in another comment. The TL;DR is that the maximum benefit you could have by eliminating investors is limited to the amount they’re participating in the market in the first place (which is much less than 100%). Meanwhile, simple zoning reforms are capable of doubling, 10x-ing, or more the amount of supply.
You didn’t do any math, and your assertion that the change in pricing is proportional to the market share is completely wrong. That’s not how pricing in markets works.
What purpose does bh serve here? And what drugs are you doing to believe this shit?
Why are you misrepresenting my argument? I never claimed BH served a purpose. If anything, my argument is closer to the opposite, which is that their presence or absence makes little difference at all.
What drugs are you doing to disbelieve that physical space exists and that not everybody who wants a single-family house with a yard in the middle of a fucking city gets to have one?
If it makes no difference then it needs to go. Its a huge investment of resources and planning permission. Spending that on no difference is insane at a societal level!
But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…
There’s certainly no market manipulation that renders supply and demand utter bollocks.
As the other person mentions, vacant homes in some rural area are irrelevant when you can not work there. Look at Japan if you want to see that dialed up to 11.
10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.
I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that’s empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?
Let’s make an example. Rent let’s say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?
They make money through speculation. Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced, even if the specific property remains exactly the same, allowing property owners to extract value from other people’s work improving the area even if they never set foot there.
Keeping the building unoccupied avoids the hassle of evicting tenants, allowing them to trade more quickly.
No, that’s not true. First of all, population both globally and in the US is not decreasing, secondly, economic development is the primary driver of property values.
The way people generally think about houses as just another commodity is all wrong. When you buy land, you are not buying the physical dirt. What you are buying is a right, a right to operate in a specific location. A location that’s close to a lot of workplaces and services is going to be more in demand than one that isn’t. Any time a subway station opens up, the value of all nearby properties goes up, regardless of the ratio of people to houses.
I have friend that lives in Vegas. They are stuck in the house they bought since the private equity ownership seems to be keeping a ton of empty homes off the market to keep scarcity and thus prices high. These companies have deep pockets and can weather the storm over long periods until the market shifts in their favor again.
By driving up the average price of a house, those housing left sitting in their portfolio all goes up in valuation, which in turn giving them more borrowing power to buy more houses.
I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use?
In the long run, they don’t. It’s a speculative bubble right now, but eventually they have to sell to somebody who intends for the property to be occupied because that’s the only way to get actual value out of it.
None of those statistics ever take into account where the empty homes are. It doesn’t matter if houses in the middle of nowhere are empty because nobody wants to live there. What matters is how many homes are allowed to exist closer in to the cities where people actually want to live.
But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…
That’s absolutely ass-backwards bullshit. Back in reality, building density is what creates walkability, not what destroys it! Quit being dishonest.
Supply is a problem and I agree about existing density-blocking laws. However this is not an either/or situation. Market effects on pricing are aggregate, not annectdotal. Taking private equity out of the market would certainly lower demand. Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.
The effect of zoning laws dwarfs the effect of private equity, to the point that focusing on the latter is absolutely just making a scapegoat to avoid fixing the actual problem.
People just love to blame private equity because they want to eat their cake and have it too (own a single-family house in the middle of a city, for a price they can afford) and can’t bear to face the reality that that is fundamentally impossible as a matter of geometry.
It’s real fucking simple, people: if 10 families want to live in the same acre of land, they don’t all get to each own a single-family house on a one-acre lot! One of them gets to (for a huge price), and the rest get physically displaced. The only way for something else to happen is for the law to change so that more housing units can be built on that acre, but the spatially-inevitable consequence of that is that each family doesn’t get their own house with a 1-acre yard.
You fundamentally cannot have it both ways, but people don’t want to accept that so they blame private equity instead.
I’m not defending private equity in the slightest, mind you! By all means, fucking murder them all if you want; IDGAF. I’m just saying y’all are gonna be all surprised_pikachu.jpg when it turns out to do fuck-all to solve the actual problem.
Edit: the irrational downvotes on my comments only help prove my point. People just can’t deal with reality, so they childishly lash out instead.
Institutional investors have tended to cluster their purchases, resulting in more concentrated investments in certain neighborhoods in a handful of markets, including Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Charlotte, and Tampa. The 2024 GAO report found that they own 25% of single-family rental homes in Atlanta and 21% of those in Jacksonville. Researchers have found that mega landlords may have contributed to the rise in housing costs, particularly in areas where they’re heavily concentrated.
The best proof you can come up with is that mega landlords “may have contributed?” It can’t even state it definitively or quantify how much?
Forgive me if I’m not persuaded.
Meanwhile, I actually live in one of the cities you mentioned, so let me give you some real perspective: even if we assumed that every single one of the 25% of homes owned by institutional investors were being kept vacant for some stupid reason – which, to be clear, they are not – transferring ownership to owner-occupants would only increase the amount of housing available by 33%. In contrast, even just the relatively minor reform of allowing ADUs on all single-family properties would increase it by up to 100%. Rezoning the R1 properties (rich people’s mansions on minimum 2-acre lots) to R4 (“normal” middle-class housing on minimum 9000 sq. ft. lots) would increase it by up to 900% in those formerly R1 areas. And those two zoning changes still remain single-family! If we actually abolished it, we’re talking about thousands of percent increases.
So having read that, which idea do you think actually would have a bigger effect: abolishing institutional real estate investors or zoning reform?
There isn’t a single person here saying that zoning laws don’t need to be changed. The only person here with their undies in a bunch is you, who just can’t seem to accept the fact that ending corporate ownership of single family homes would increase the housing supply and reduce prices. “But it doesn’t do it as much as this other thing!!” Wtf dude what are you even arguing for
If you have a 1 km² (one square kilometer, = 1 million square meters) area. And the law dictates that only single-family houses can be built on it, with a minimum lot size of 500 m² each, then assuming 4 people per house, you can build 2000 houses in that area or house around 8000 people.
If you allow multi-family houses. Such as i live in one in Austria. Close to the city. The house has a lot size of about 1000 m² (with a big park in the middle), and 25 people live in it. If you build houses like that, you can house around 25000 people. More than triple!
I’m sure when we build more properties Blackrock won’t continue to buy them as well as the 1/3 they already own in my city. Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?
Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?
Exactly that. Pretending that zoning restricting the supply isn’t the problem plays right into the investors hands, because the supply shortage is what juices their investment returns!!!
And by the way: sure, fine, we could ban institutional investors from owning housing – whatever, I literally do not care. What actually matters is the fact that even with them gone, if the zoning doesn’t change we will still have all of the same problems because everyone will still be wanting to cram themselves into cities and the law will still be preventing the housing from accommodating them all. The unmet demand will continue to make prices skyrocket even if every bidder is a would-be owner-occupant, and everyone else will be forced out and have to commute back in, with all the negative consequences in terms of traffic, pollution, obesity, etc. that entails.
So you think we can build enough housing to drive housing down so much that it’s no longer useful as an investment therefore it doesn’t matter if we’re competing with companies on the market?
Maybe, maybe not, but I think it’s worth a try! And even if it fails to do that, we would have accidentally built nicer places to live anyway – the horror!
Too bad the authoritarian NIMBY temporarily-embarrassed landlords infesting this thread are too enraged at the idea to even allow it to be considered.
(Also, I added to my previous comment after you replied. Might help answer your question.)
Zoning and NIMBYs are definitely a problem but I think inequality is the main problem here, the bank will always take the best deal and we will never be a better deal to them.
Focusing on zoning without banning multi-property ownership or institutional investment properties might put more people in rental housing units (often owned by institutional investors), but it doesn’t help break up increasingly concentrated property ownership
Zoning and NIMBYs are definitely a problem but I think inequality is the main problem here,
WTF do you think zoning is for?! It is intentionally, comprehensively, fractally racist and classist, and has been, by design, since its inception!
Quick history lesson:
First, there was de-jure housing segregation. That eventually got struck down by the courts (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917).
Next, racists responded by making racially-restrictive “Covenant, Conditions and Restrictions” (CC&Rs). Eventually, those were ruled unenforceable too (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), although they did evolve into modern HOAs that still often act discriminatorily using some excuse other than race as a fig leaf.
Finally, racists came up with zoning density restrictions: if they couldn’t keep black people out because they were black, at least they could try to keep them out by mandating a large minimum lot size and hoping they were too poor to afford it. (And it would keep the white trash out, too, so another silver lining there from their perspective.)
There’s a reason why all of these laws about single-family zoning (as opposed to other zoning laws about noxious land uses like paper mills and other manufacturing, which came a lot earlier) started popping up after 1948.
So yeah, that’s where we’re at. That’s why single-family zoning with large minimum lot sizes is a thing in this country. Anybody trying to make excuses otherwise is being ahistorical.
I already said I agree about zoning I just disagree that zoning solves the problem without also shoring up institutional investors.
I’m aware of zoning and housing discrimination.
I get the sense that you’re arguing from the perspective of someone who has been traumatized from arguing with so many NIMBYs, but this thread probably has few to none of those people.
I get the sense that you’re arguing from the perspective of someone who has been traumatized from arguing with so many NIMBYs…
That part you’re probably right about!
…but this thread probably has few to none of those people.
Maybe, but you might be surprised at how much NIMBYism transcends the political spectrum. I live in one of the most progressive (not “liberal;” genuinely progressive) parts of my city and we’ve still got a bunch of them whining in zoning meetings etc.
For the third(?) time in this thread alone, houses in bumfuck nowhere don’t count! Real estate is local. Demand is local. Location is not fungible, and a house in the exurbs is not equivalent to one in a walkable urban neighborhood.
You are not fucking entitled to pretend that housing shortages in cities don’t exist just because other houses exist in some shitty place nobody wants to be somewhere else!
I think your attitude is missing an even bigger picture on top of your bigger markets picture. People can be black rock assholes masturbating with their invisible hands or they can be nice to each other. Markets will adapt…
Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
no, unfortunately people don’t seem to get that. there’s a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.
You could start by practicing what you preach and actually substantiating any of these claims.
do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
Who is defending which “authoritarian laws that distort the market in there favor” here? I legitimately have no idea what that’s referring to. Zoning laws? Are there any comments on here that are actually saying that?
Who is defending which “authoritarian laws that distort the market in there favor” here? I legitimately have no idea what that’s referring to. Zoning laws? Are there any comments on here that are actually saying that?
I’m being massively downvoted for advocating for zoning reform, so yes, that’s what people here are conveying even if you carefully phrased your question as a “gotcha” to try to pretend that doesn’t count.
The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not. Even if every market participant were an individual, that (presumably not overly wealthy) single mother of four is still going to get out-competed.
The only actual solution is to increase supply, which means abolishing the wealthy-favoring laws that make it illegal to build (i.e. the laws mandating things like single-family houses and minimum parking requirements).
Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
Where do middle men live in this equation? What about lenders, administrators, and housing developers?
Ten houses are on the market. These houses range from $250k to $5M in listed price.
I have $20k for a down payment and $200k in borrowing power.
You have $30k for a down payment and $300k in borrowing power.
Berkshire Hathaway has $373.31 Billion for down payments and functionally unlimited borrowing power.
How many extra houses need to be built before you or I can outbid BH for a home?
Let’s find out!
Get cracking, scout!
I think the most efficient way to get people housed with that is to build something much smaller than a house.
That’s just called a prison cell
Oh. No! Nice and open and airy. With a little basket for their heads to rest in. Very cozy.
I mean sure we can ban institutional investors from buying up houses in your area, but the question is: will new houses stlil continue to be built? or are houses mostly built because the developers intend to sell them to institutional investors that can pay high prices for it?
in any case, the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can’t only ban one without also pushing the other.
Yes, obviously.
I would go farther and say institutional investment undermines social housing, as social housing cuts into the profits of institutional investors.
Doesn’t matter, because even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated from the bidding, when a dozen buyers with $200k or $300k in buying power are in the market and only one house is for sale because it’s literally illegal for more to be built, only one of you is going to be able to get the house!
I really don’t get your angle. Let’s say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there’s an immediate drop in demand, so the current supply satisfies more individuals. Why are you arguing against this?
No there is not. Those corporations exist to make profit, and profit (in the long run) only comes from either tenants paying to occupy the house or selling it on to some other owner who will then either occupy it themselves or find tenants of their own. Even if it’s a speculative bubble right now, sooner or later that game of musical chairs has to end and people have to sit down; otherwise they lose.
i think the problem of institutional investors is mostly that they’re unnecessary middle-men, taking a slice of the cake while not actually providing anything of value.
they buy the house, then rent it out to the local population. in the end, they make a profit that way, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. that is money that could have gone into the local community instead.
either you need local middlemen, like the municipality (which i am advocating for!) or people need to buy the houses directly themselves. i remember reading an article that renting is often better for inhabitants since they don’t need to do a down-payment and also they carry less risk that way. also interestingly many can build more wealth by renting+investing instead of house buying. ~~https://www.moneydigest.com/1580083/renting-vs-owning-both-can-help-you-build-wealth-according-to-personal-finance-expert/~~
edit: damn it i can’t find the article anymore
How many properties is BH sitting on unsold? How many are going to open up with the death of the Boomer homeowner generation?
Between 13.1 million and 14.6 million Boomers are projected to “exit homeownership” between 2026 and 2036. Who will own those homes when they are gone?
Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes
We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus. What we lack is jobs paying at the going mortgage rate
There are dumb laws in some places privileging things like sfh over apartments, to the point of exclusion. But more to their point:
Just look at any zoning map. It’s all the (usually) yellow parts, i.e. the single-family-zoned areas, which make up the vast bulk of most cities’ residential land area.
Sure, in the exurbs nobody actually wants to live in!
Are you claiming that you can’t build homes in a residential neighborhood?
The exurbs were very popular during COVID work from home
After the lots have already had single-family houses on them and you aren’t allowed to subdivide or replace them with multifamily buildings? Yes! That’s exactly what I’m claiming!
Every single-family house in the close-in parts of the city represents the physical displacement of multiple families that could have lived in that space if it had been a multifamily building instead. Those families are literally forced further out into the suburbs, and then have to commute back in. That’s where the traffic, high prices, lack of walkability, pollution, obesity crisis due to sedentary lifestyles, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum all come from!
Are you suggesting a housing ban is when you build a house and I can’t knock your house over to build a new one with more units?
I’m getting really sick and tired of you trying to play coy with terminology, or whatever the Hell it is you’re trying to do. Are you really so fucking dense that you’re confused by what I wrote?
It’s illegal to build multi-family (i.e. more housing) in areas zoned for single-family. What part of that did you not understand?
So suddenly the law of supply and demand conveniently no longer applies? By removing demand from the market, we’re not lowering prices?
Do you think these investors just have magic unlimited funds to hoard vacant housing forever? No. They exist to make a profit, which means sooner or later they either have to get occupants into those units or sell them on to somebody who will. This “additional” demand from property hoarders who apparently (according to your logic) love vacant buildings because they’re fucking morons who hate money is, in the long run, fictional.
That doesn’t matter! They are still inducing extra demand, which still raises prices for normal people trying to buy homes.
Look, if you want to do something about the investors because of inequality or unfairness or whatever, have at it. I’m just saying that if your goal is to fix housing prices, zoning reform would be vastly more effective as a strategy.
I did the math in another comment. The TL;DR is that the maximum benefit you could have by eliminating investors is limited to the amount they’re participating in the market in the first place (which is much less than 100%). Meanwhile, simple zoning reforms are capable of doubling, 10x-ing, or more the amount of supply.
You didn’t do any math, and your assertion that the change in pricing is proportional to the market share is completely wrong. That’s not how pricing in markets works.
That’s not at all what I said. If you’re going to claim that I’m wrong at least have the decency to not misrepresent my argument.
So we should let bh get the house, instead of any of us?
What purpose does bh serve here? And what drugs are you doing to believe this shit?
Why are you misrepresenting my argument? I never claimed BH served a purpose. If anything, my argument is closer to the opposite, which is that their presence or absence makes little difference at all.
What drugs are you doing to disbelieve that physical space exists and that not everybody who wants a single-family house with a yard in the middle of a fucking city gets to have one?
If it makes no difference then it needs to go. Its a huge investment of resources and planning permission. Spending that on no difference is insane at a societal level!
https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…
There’s certainly no market manipulation that renders supply and demand utter bollocks.
As the other person mentions, vacant homes in some rural area are irrelevant when you can not work there. Look at Japan if you want to see that dialed up to 11.
10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.
I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that’s empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?
Let’s make an example. Rent let’s say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?
They make money through speculation. Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced, even if the specific property remains exactly the same, allowing property owners to extract value from other people’s work improving the area even if they never set foot there.
Keeping the building unoccupied avoids the hassle of evicting tenants, allowing them to trade more quickly.
they will actually decrease long-term (in most areas) as the population is shrinking, meaning less demand for housing.
No, that’s not true. First of all, population both globally and in the US is not decreasing, secondly, economic development is the primary driver of property values.
The way people generally think about houses as just another commodity is all wrong. When you buy land, you are not buying the physical dirt. What you are buying is a right, a right to operate in a specific location. A location that’s close to a lot of workplaces and services is going to be more in demand than one that isn’t. Any time a subway station opens up, the value of all nearby properties goes up, regardless of the ratio of people to houses.
I have friend that lives in Vegas. They are stuck in the house they bought since the private equity ownership seems to be keeping a ton of empty homes off the market to keep scarcity and thus prices high. These companies have deep pockets and can weather the storm over long periods until the market shifts in their favor again.
By driving up the average price of a house, those housing left sitting in their portfolio all goes up in valuation, which in turn giving them more borrowing power to buy more houses.
In the long run, they don’t. It’s a speculative bubble right now, but eventually they have to sell to somebody who intends for the property to be occupied because that’s the only way to get actual value out of it.
None of those statistics ever take into account where the empty homes are. It doesn’t matter if houses in the middle of nowhere are empty because nobody wants to live there. What matters is how many homes are allowed to exist closer in to the cities where people actually want to live.
That’s absolutely ass-backwards bullshit. Back in reality, building density is what creates walkability, not what destroys it! Quit being dishonest.
Supply is a problem and I agree about existing density-blocking laws. However this is not an either/or situation. Market effects on pricing are aggregate, not annectdotal. Taking private equity out of the market would certainly lower demand. Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.
And plenty of units are converted rentals that leverage the borrowing power of the owner to upcharge the tenant.
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The effect of zoning laws dwarfs the effect of private equity, to the point that focusing on the latter is absolutely just making a scapegoat to avoid fixing the actual problem.
People just love to blame private equity because they want to eat their cake and have it too (own a single-family house in the middle of a city, for a price they can afford) and can’t bear to face the reality that that is fundamentally impossible as a matter of geometry.
It’s real fucking simple, people: if 10 families want to live in the same acre of land, they don’t all get to each own a single-family house on a one-acre lot! One of them gets to (for a huge price), and the rest get physically displaced. The only way for something else to happen is for the law to change so that more housing units can be built on that acre, but the spatially-inevitable consequence of that is that each family doesn’t get their own house with a 1-acre yard.
You fundamentally cannot have it both ways, but people don’t want to accept that so they blame private equity instead.
I’m not defending private equity in the slightest, mind you! By all means, fucking murder them all if you want; IDGAF. I’m just saying y’all are gonna be all surprised_pikachu.jpg when it turns out to do fuck-all to solve the actual problem.
Edit: the irrational downvotes on my comments only help prove my point. People just can’t deal with reality, so they childishly lash out instead.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ban-wall-street-buying-houses-not-solution-home-prices-2026-1
The best proof you can come up with is that mega landlords “may have contributed?” It can’t even state it definitively or quantify how much?
Forgive me if I’m not persuaded.
Meanwhile, I actually live in one of the cities you mentioned, so let me give you some real perspective: even if we assumed that every single one of the 25% of homes owned by institutional investors were being kept vacant for some stupid reason – which, to be clear, they are not – transferring ownership to owner-occupants would only increase the amount of housing available by 33%. In contrast, even just the relatively minor reform of allowing ADUs on all single-family properties would increase it by up to 100%. Rezoning the R1 properties (rich people’s mansions on minimum 2-acre lots) to R4 (“normal” middle-class housing on minimum 9000 sq. ft. lots) would increase it by up to 900% in those formerly R1 areas. And those two zoning changes still remain single-family! If we actually abolished it, we’re talking about thousands of percent increases.
So having read that, which idea do you think actually would have a bigger effect: abolishing institutional real estate investors or zoning reform?
There isn’t a single person here saying that zoning laws don’t need to be changed. The only person here with their undies in a bunch is you, who just can’t seem to accept the fact that ending corporate ownership of single family homes would increase the housing supply and reduce prices. “But it doesn’t do it as much as this other thing!!” Wtf dude what are you even arguing for
Just so you’re aware, downvotes have never proven someone’s point.
thank you for your comment. just to add to it:
If you have a 1 km² (one square kilometer, = 1 million square meters) area. And the law dictates that only single-family houses can be built on it, with a minimum lot size of 500 m² each, then assuming 4 people per house, you can build 2000 houses in that area or house around 8000 people.
If you allow multi-family houses. Such as i live in one in Austria. Close to the city. The house has a lot size of about 1000 m² (with a big park in the middle), and 25 people live in it. If you build houses like that, you can house around 25000 people. More than triple!
I’m sure when we build more properties Blackrock won’t continue to buy them as well as the 1/3 they already own in my city. Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?
Exactly that. Pretending that zoning restricting the supply isn’t the problem plays right into the investors hands, because the supply shortage is what juices their investment returns!!!
And by the way: sure, fine, we could ban institutional investors from owning housing – whatever, I literally do not care. What actually matters is the fact that even with them gone, if the zoning doesn’t change we will still have all of the same problems because everyone will still be wanting to cram themselves into cities and the law will still be preventing the housing from accommodating them all. The unmet demand will continue to make prices skyrocket even if every bidder is a would-be owner-occupant, and everyone else will be forced out and have to commute back in, with all the negative consequences in terms of traffic, pollution, obesity, etc. that entails.
So you think we can build enough housing to drive housing down so much that it’s no longer useful as an investment therefore it doesn’t matter if we’re competing with companies on the market?
Maybe, maybe not, but I think it’s worth a try! And even if it fails to do that, we would have accidentally built nicer places to live anyway – the horror!
Too bad the authoritarian NIMBY temporarily-embarrassed landlords infesting this thread are too enraged at the idea to even allow it to be considered.
(Also, I added to my previous comment after you replied. Might help answer your question.)
Zoning and NIMBYs are definitely a problem but I think inequality is the main problem here, the bank will always take the best deal and we will never be a better deal to them.
Focusing on zoning without banning multi-property ownership or institutional investment properties might put more people in rental housing units (often owned by institutional investors), but it doesn’t help break up increasingly concentrated property ownership
WTF do you think zoning is for?! It is intentionally, comprehensively, fractally racist and classist, and has been, by design, since its inception!
Quick history lesson:
First, there was de-jure housing segregation. That eventually got struck down by the courts (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917).
Next, racists responded by making racially-restrictive “Covenant, Conditions and Restrictions” (CC&Rs). Eventually, those were ruled unenforceable too (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), although they did evolve into modern HOAs that still often act discriminatorily using some excuse other than race as a fig leaf.
Finally, racists came up with zoning density restrictions: if they couldn’t keep black people out because they were black, at least they could try to keep them out by mandating a large minimum lot size and hoping they were too poor to afford it. (And it would keep the white trash out, too, so another silver lining there from their perspective.)
There’s a reason why all of these laws about single-family zoning (as opposed to other zoning laws about noxious land uses like paper mills and other manufacturing, which came a lot earlier) started popping up after 1948.
So yeah, that’s where we’re at. That’s why single-family zoning with large minimum lot sizes is a thing in this country. Anybody trying to make excuses otherwise is being ahistorical.
I already said I agree about zoning I just disagree that zoning solves the problem without also shoring up institutional investors.
I’m aware of zoning and housing discrimination.
I get the sense that you’re arguing from the perspective of someone who has been traumatized from arguing with so many NIMBYs, but this thread probably has few to none of those people.
That part you’re probably right about!
Maybe, but you might be surprised at how much NIMBYism transcends the political spectrum. I live in one of the most progressive (not “liberal;” genuinely progressive) parts of my city and we’ve still got a bunch of them whining in zoning meetings etc.
There are enough empty houses in the US to give FOUR to every unhoused person. It is NOT a supply issue.
For the third(?) time in this thread alone, houses in bumfuck nowhere don’t count! Real estate is local. Demand is local. Location is not fungible, and a house in the exurbs is not equivalent to one in a walkable urban neighborhood.
You are not fucking entitled to pretend that housing shortages in cities don’t exist just because other houses exist in some shitty place nobody wants to be somewhere else!
Well you’re wrong.
Shouldn’t be a market for housing or healthcare
If you really think ‘authoritarian’ laws help them, it’s because the laws don’t go far enough.
There are four empty homes for every homeless person in this country. I can think of a few laws that would fix it overnight.
It’s concerning that people don’t seem to understand this.
https://thepremierdaily.com/200-nebraska-farmers-remain-silent-during-auction-so-a-young-man-can-buy-back-his-family-farm/
That was a plot on Little House on the Prairie.
A farm auction in rural Nebraska, where the land is exactly the polar opposite of scarce, has fuck-all to do with my point about density in cities.
I think your attitude is missing an even bigger picture on top of your bigger markets picture. People can be black rock assholes masturbating with their invisible hands or they can be nice to each other. Markets will adapt…
Yeah man, the answer is social ridicule and not regulations 🙄
There is a supply problem. There is some dumb shit.
But like fixing the climate, none of it matters while a billionaire still draws breathe
Good luck with that
no, unfortunately people don’t seem to get that. there’s a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.
You could start by practicing what you preach and actually substantiating any of these claims.
Who is defending which “authoritarian laws that distort the market in there favor” here? I legitimately have no idea what that’s referring to. Zoning laws? Are there any comments on here that are actually saying that?
I’m being massively downvoted for advocating for zoning reform, so yes, that’s what people here are conveying even if you carefully phrased your question as a “gotcha” to try to pretend that doesn’t count.
People aren’t downvoting you for saying zoning is a problem, they’re downvoting you for saying Blackrock isn’t a problem.
I never said Blackrock wasn’t a problem (in some general sense); I only said it isn’t the real reason the prices are high.
Weird how blaming Blackrock is “literally defending” zoning laws but blaming zoning laws isn’t “literally defending” Blackrock.