> They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing.

Raising prices when you only have a tiny portion of the market does not work. People won't buy them when there's another house for less.

    > because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing.

    > instrumentalized

    > securitized

    > with derivative products

    > speculation

The vast majority of land in the country has been owned by capitalistic profit motivated players since 1776 - individual home owner occupiers.

If you doubt they will lobby to increase their profit, try proposing anything that has a 0.1% risk of their property value going down and see how they react.

An article making that case: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

A rebuttal to that article from Derek Thompson: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-abundance-critique-...

“properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives”

Spoken like someone has no clue what they are talking about and just throwing out jargon

Why doesn't your explanation apply to every commodity? Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity? These are also essential products subject to the influence of markets and market makers.

I somehow doubt these institutions are market makers in the housing market, if they had been ones then they'd be offering to sell and buy houses all the time, this is a market maker's function.

Not buying this. Have you seen studies that support this line of arguments?

A “market maker” provides liquidity that allows trades to clear and keeps prices stable. They make money on the bid-ask spread. They don’t have leverage to raise or lower prices.

The majority of the US population (65% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N) are home owners. I agree that high home prices are not in the interest of the majority of the population, but I bet the majority think so.

If you have a model where you can do price manipulation of something while owning 1% of it, I understand why you wouldn’t share it. Where are you on the Forbes Billionaire List, out of curiosity?

If what you say is true, wouldn't the same argument apply to practically every market these institutions are in? Oil, timber, steel, AI stuff, cars, you name it.

> you allow for policy that doesn't maximize the cost of real estate over the interests of the majority of the population.

How do you think homeowners would feel about a policy that doesn't maximize the value of their homes. That's just another way to phrase "maximizing the cost of real estate"?

Supply and demand sets prices.

The gobbledygook you posted, “ properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing”, is just that, gobbledygook.

Just because a buyer as Inc. behind its name doesn’t give it magical powers to set market prices.

If you think it does, then please explain it to us like we are really slow.

Based on the data I've seen, respectfully, you are wrong. No, I can't share it. The data is publicly available, however. Feel free to dig it up and aggregate it. The data is publicly available, the effort to dig into it, finding meaning, and sell it to folks, however, is not.

This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society.

IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing.

Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction!

North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals.

Here in Norway the solution, as with so many other things, is taxing. Your home is evaluated at some "market rate", but if it's your primary residence the effective tax value is just 25% up to $1 million (70% on value above $1 million). For reference, a typical 3-room apartment in Oslo, the capital, is around $400-500k.

However, if it's not your primary residence, then you pay tax on 100% of the "market rate". The tax rate is 1%, so not insignificant.

Until a few years ago, tax on non-primary residences was much lower, and hence we had a lot more people buying to rent if they inherited money or similar. Some even had a dozen or more properties. These have now exited, so policy is working as intended.

One thing of course politicians for some reason didn't think of is that if most of the landlords suddenly sell, rental market will shrink. So now it's super-expensive to rent, and those who rent usually do so because they can't buy for one reason or another (no stable income to support a loan for example).

Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country.

IF you want affordability? Tax land.

Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wall street.

For affordability reasons, just build more housing. It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

India still has this in some states [1]. You wind up with everyone in the family owning a house. After that, other people own it and pass on most of the rent.

Better: progressive capital-gains taxes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regula...

This would certainly drive down prices - how much is an open question. But I think its a fair compromise, UNTIL we actually do have enough homes for everyone. Until then something has to give - right now its people who can't own a single home that are yielding, but IMO it would be much more fair to ask people who already own a home to yield (not buy more than one). Ultimately that's the tradeoff to discuss.

Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

Many people wish to rent, not buy. If we make it so each landlord can own fewer homes, but renting demand stays similar we just incentivise more people becoming landlords

Corporations are people and states aren't legally entitled to know the composition of a foreign corporation's membership.

I'm in favor of a property tax multiplier that increases with the number of properties owned.

That's a surefire way to make sure that all rental properties are controlled by people who are able to de facto own a lot of properties with family members (or "family" members) on the paperwork, and who are able to enforce their ownership with extrajudicial means.

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

Price controls and limits like this rarely work out in history.

Around here, many landlords renovate or build new high density construction. Put a cap on how many properties they can own and they'll switch from building/renting as many units as possible to maximizing the rent on the limited number of properties they can own.

Restricting the market in one dimension rarely has the desire effect.

Should this apply to multi-family homes or just single family?

The purpose of people putting money into stocks or real estate is to allow for a simple, fairly 'hands-off' way to make money (real estate is not totally hands off, but is pretty close to a set-it-and-forget-it business).

Real estate works for this because you can really put in as much as you want into it.

Other business activities do not work because the entrance cost for non-rent-seeking business is extremely high and the risk is way too high compared to real estate. This is due to American regulation and labor laws.

This is a 'first-world problem', but now that I have capital, the question is 'what to do with it'?. Yeah, you could throw it in the stock market, but that's also rent-seeking in a sense because you're not really able to invest in primary rounds (I mean you can, but it's hard to find deals), so basically you're just providing liquidity to people, which is rent-seeking of a different kind.

So then the question becomes what else to do with it? I've given a ton away, but that's useless for the most part since it barely creates any economic value.

In my ideal world, I'd start a factory and hire a manager, but the capital cost of that is high, not because of the material or the rental cost, but because of the labor cost. So then, what's the option? I could easily outsource it all to China or India, but that's completely useless for the United States.

Then the question becomes, why start your own, when you could invest in others. Great! I would love to do that. It would be even better if I could simply invest in a local enterprise... Except, that's not easy either. Regulation over investments means that even investing in this is fraught with difficulty unless you want to establish some sort of 'fund'.

So basically, there's nothing to do with the money, which is sad, since I end up giving most of the money I make away anyway, and would prefer to have more of it to give away.

Until America figures out what it wants to be, it's going to be real estate for me... consistent incomes, fairly uncorrelated with equities (which I have a lot of too), etc. There's really not many other options here. There's barely any 'productive' activities taking place in the United States.

That would not be useful. A far better solution would be to drive up rates to make/force landlords unload properties they could only afford at lower rates and also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. It’s basic supply and demand, but ironically the immigrant supporters are allied with the billionaires and generally wealthy who profit from piling in ever more people into the same supply of housing and amenities and resources.

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause.

Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market.

The problem is when people who want to own houses can't afford them, even when they contribute meaningfully to society. The root cause of this is not landlords existing. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system, to a point that the additional wealth gives them no real benefit, but serves only to remove that wealth from the vast majority of otherwise middle class people.

If you want to fix this problem return the top tax tiers to what they were 50, 75, 100 years ago and the problem will be severely reduced. It's not sufficient to solve it, but its low hanging fruit.

> Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime.

In states I've lived in with property tax there is a homestead exemption for the house you live in. In my current state that's about twice the tax.

The effect: Rent goes up to cover the tax and margin is added, so the rent goes up more than the tax.

>Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.

Usually the difference is that the big investor bought the property at lower price, and your rent is based on the lower valuation. Annual rent increases are usually are much lower than market increases - there's a lot of value in keeping a tenant year over year.

> Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.

Suppose you had $100,000 in cash, and buy a house for $100,000. You'll not be paying 5% interest on a mortgage. But if you did not buy the house, you would be investing that $100,000 for a 5% return.

So, you're either paying 5% on the mortgage, or foregoing 5% return for investing that money.

The rich person is not getting a discount.

It depends on the state, but that is largely kind of already the case. At least in my state you get a significant deduction to your property taxes if it is your primary residence.

That sounds nice, but I think that increased tax will just be passed down as higher rent.

With today requirements for accounting, somebody with economics background could tell what would be wrong with following solution?:

If you house owned by commercial entity - taxes are payed from full value, but the valuation to any collateral/derivative goes by something like (0.75x)^l, where l how many levels deep (counting ownership levels). For example it house is in some sort collateral/derivate/indirect ownership mix with 4 levels deep, it can only valuated as 0.31x value (you can only account as it is worth 1/3). In my mind it should reduce attractiveness for speculative buying.

Additional property tax? Do you have any idea what property taxes are like in places like NJ, NY? It's 2-3% of the value, sometimes assessed at sales value. People buy despite this because they like an area or a school system. If you raise it more, rest assured that only the rich will have the right to buy. It's as regressive as it gets, your proposal.

But you'd have an asset you own at the end of that period, and your mortgage payments wouldn't go up over time whereas rent likely would.

Key adjustment to your first proposal: the additional property tax should also be waived when having long-term renters/occupants.

Property taxes are directly and immediately translate into higher rent.

Making rent more expensive doesn't make ownership cheaper, just makes it more attractive relative to renting.

> If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per mo

... and you would be building equity.

So you pay less and get less, right?

You're thinking this is a sign that you are being cheated. It seems to me that it's a sign you're getting a better deal by renting so that's beneficial to you.

You lumped a bunch of factors together (interest rates, HOA, taxes) that don't do much for your argument. You would pay less taxes than the landlord in most jurisdictions, because the unit would be owner-occupied. Do you think the landlord isn't paying HOA assessments? Sure they are. The landlord has a loan at 3% because they bought in 2021. You're offered 6.5% because you're buying in 2026. I'm not convinced it's worth my pity.

It'd be simpler to just have a high LVT and treat it as a credit instead of deductible.

Opportunity cost means makes purchasing with a mortgage wiser than buying cash. $1000/month more for a few years is nothing compared to the property value increase of a $1M property

1) Is already how things work. Every single municipality I've ever seen in the US offers an owner-occupancy tax abatement.

2) Would just inflate home prices.

"Corporations" is meaningless in this context. If you want to own a rental home in the US, you should set up an LLC, both for liability reasons and because it makes it easier to deal with taxes and expenses.

In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy / build one. Commercial real estate too.

If you click around your neighborhood, a lot of single-family homes are owned by living trusts and "Bob & Kate" LLCs, but that doesn't mean there's any hedge fund money involved.

But is that Big Money Private Equity or "took a class from that Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who said we should create a company and invest in real estate" corporation?

Many people register houses they purchase in LLCs for privacy protection purposes

"Clark" is an arbitrary commenter.

The actual data provided was:

> For example, corporate landlords own more than 12,000 homes in Paulding and Henry County, accounting for 11.2% and 9.9% of all single-family homes in the counties.

> Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?

I never went far enough to get all the details back when I was considering a move, but my impression is a lot of these "buy your home and close fast" corporate purchasers were offering just enough to make the speed and ability to not have to make a lot of major improvements worth the lost money from selling on the market. Then they do just enough work to clean up any "show stopper" problems and re-sell at market prices.

So (very simplified) if you have a home that might sell for 200k on the market if you put 10k of work into it, but you need to move in a few months, and you need to pay off 100k on the loan, the company offers you something like 180k. You walk away with 80k (instead of 90k) in your pocket and avoid the various real estate agent fees and the need to do any of the fix up work or deal with trying to sell and move at the same time. The company puts the $10k of work into it and sells for the 200k, pocketing the $10k you gave up.

Exactly. Nobody wants to hear this, because we're all Temporarily Embarrassed Landlords, but if a corporation buying 100 houses to sit on and extract rent is bad (or good), then 100 individuals each buying 1 house to sit on and extract rent must be equally bad (or good).

Once you try to clamp down on investment properties, you have couples getting divorces so they can own two homes (this happened in China), and all your kids are going to have their own home as well.

It isn't a bad idea, people will game whatever. A singapore public housing system might work better, but I doubt it would work for SFHs.

Why isn't it your cousin's tenant who is the problem?

Why do you think they aren't on the market right now? These companies buy them so that they can rent them. They are on the rental market!

Not really, because the problem isn't investors buying homes, its a lack of supply of new homes. Big investors don't buy homes to keep them empty, they buy them to rent them out. An exception to this might be short term rentals but that is going to be significant in only a few markets and the problem there is still fundamentally a supply problem.

Here's a report where you can see which areas have a high percentage of big investors (not just people who own 2-3 homes):

https://go.lincolninst.edu/whoa-mapping-corp-ownership-repor...

Exactly, absolute ownership numbers matter less for housing prices than the proportion of corporate buyers in the market.

Pension funds like Ontario Teacher's are institutional investors who would be barred as well according to this proposal.

I worked with these firms for several years when the business concept was in its earlier stages. The money coming in to buy these homes quickly went from family offices (2013-2019) to state pension funds (2019-present) to sovereign funds (2020-present).

Things like the largest pension fund in Sweden is invested in buying SFR. Or the sovereign fund of the UAE.

I’m not sure if that changed your opinion on this not having practical benefit for the average American.

After a decade of national politics, and many decades of his "business", too many people still take "Trump says" as anything more than a piece of a con.

I don't think a stock market reaction is a good way to measure their impact on the housing market. It's not that they aren't involved in the market, it's that their impact is questionable given the relative size of their participation.

The tweet says blackstone. Thats a separate firm from blackrock. And the tweets misleading in the first place, it's looking at the bottom of a candle which wasn't even the current price at the time of the photograph? And the stock closed at about 154.

Besides all this says is that it matters for blackstone...not for the housing market at large.

A hit in the stock price doesn't prove or disprove their claims. What would disprove their claims is the number of properties Blackrock is buying and if it is affecting pricing at the margin.

Now explain Tesla stock.

He's in real estate. Of course he has an angle. Hopefully they can get something worthwhile into the eventual bill anyways.

I would hard cap how many houses anybody can own to something like 4 - whether through an LLC or otherwise. Many countries do not or did not allow foreign ownership of residential real estate. It's definitely not in the interest of any people to have their very land taken from them. In the current climate that would likely take an extremely nasty turn so it's not the best time for it, but I would be very supportive of such a measure with an exception for permanent residents and spouses of US citizens.

Agreed, I think the simple answer is the tax rate is one thing for a primary residence and another for non-primary residences regardless of who owns it. For example in CA, Prop 13 stays in place for your primary residence, but properties are re-assessed every year like in Texas if it's not your primary residence. In addition, take away some (or all) of the tax deductions for SFH that aren't primary residences.

Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem.

Building more housing is the opposite of a problem.

Do you have any source? Googling it tells me otherwise.

I don’t read this as being against it at all. They’re simply pointing out it doesn’t have that big of an impact because of a bigger problem that remains.

I'm not against the idea per se, but "institutional investors are buying up homes" is an effect, not a cause. Boomers demanded that "house values are never allowed to go down, only up" and put all manner of construction-preventing policy in place to make sure this happened, so of course institutional investors showed up. If there's an asset class which is only allowed to go up, why wouldn't they?

Banning institutional investment doesn't remove the "can only go up" laws and mindset, so I think (assuming this even happens, which it probably won't: TACO) the actual effect on prices will be minimal.

Too much TDS man. Not everything is about Trump.

each person can only own one property.

You're going to need some exceptions. What happens when someone dies and leaves their house to their kids? What if someone's home is temporarily unlivable (say due to a fire or flood which requires extensive renovation) -- do they have to live on the streets?

And that's not even addressing the obvious question of what happens to tenants if there are no landlords.

The problem is supply, not distribution.

Would that not make rental properties entirely illegal? That seems... complicated

Current government has explicitly said that they will not lower hose prices:

"We're not trying to bring down house prices," Housing Minister Clare O'Neil declared on ABC's youth radio station triple j.

"That may be the view of young people, [but] it's not the view of our government."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/housing-minister-says...

YIMBYs would argue (and in my view rightly) that if you allow townhouses and apartments to be built, the market will build them where there is a demand.

It's the same in New Zealand - property is the primary mechanism for wealth creation, and you have boomers with 10+ properties that they use for rental income for their retirement.

The issue is exacerbated by the tax structures not incentivizing investments in other assets - e.g. in NZ if you invest over $50k in offshore equities, there is an annual FIF tax that must be paid, even for unrealized gains.

> In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment

That's true of most of the Western world, unfortunately.

> a primary mechanism for wealth creation

I don't disagree but this needs to be correctly framed publicly as simply stealing from the next generation because that's what it is.

> Tax incentives

For anyone unfamiliar, Australia has a system called negative gearing. In the mid-2010s the then Labor party proposed scrapping it and lost the election. It really is the third rail of Australian politics. This is a shame because it needs to be scrapped.

It allows you to deduct losses on property against your ordinary income. So if you have a mortgage payment of $3000/month but only earn $2000/month in rent then your income is reduced by $1000/month. That's waht drives a lot of small investors to essentially speculate on property.

The US actually has a better system than this, which is that if you earn over a certain income level, you cannot deduct passive losses (like the above situation) against ordinary income. That would be better but still not enough.

So many upper income Australians essentially end up just hoarding property. They'll call it "investment properties" but really it's speculation. Historically, property was treated as an income producing asset, not a speculative capitals gains asset.

Oh and capital gains on non-primary residences should be like 70%. If you want to stop rampant speculation, that's how you do it.

> Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses?

Perth like every Australian city is an urban planning disaster. It's just endless sprawl up and down the coast and inland to the hills. A generation or two ago it was a quarter acre block. Those days are long gone unless you're wealthy or you're 50km+ from the city (less if you go east).

So it's a car-dependent soulless hellhole. I say this as someone who knows Perth well. So even now if you build higher-density housing along transit routes, as they're doing, you still need a car (or 4) to go anywhere but work. And high land values make infrastructure projects incredibly expensive. Like imagine trying to build the Perth to Mandurah train line now instead of 30+ years ago when it was actually built. I guess they could utilize the Freeway they already had but what about the fremantle or Midland lines?

What you should do as you build out is reserve space for future infrastructure. AFAIK no Australian city, especially Perth, has never done. So Guildford Road or Great Eastern Highway should really be a freeway. Same with Albany Highway.

In 2024 Western Australia did really relax ADU (granny flat) development rules. The rules used to be really strict. Now you can basically always build one with normal building approval if you meet the minimum lot size requirements (generally 450sqm, sometimes as low as 350sqm, depending on the council).

Single family home zoning is really cancer to any decently sized city.

Anyway, the truth is, I'm not sure it can be fixed now. Big infrastructure projects are prohibitively expensive even with tools like eminent domain. We need to look at why it's so expensive to build apartments.

I think the only thing you can do now is for the government to become a significant suplier of housing to increase supply and stabilize rents.

I think it's possible to make apartment/condo living more attractive in the US, but you'd need a few changes. For example:

* American apartment complexes are typically ugly as hell. They're little building islands in a sea of asphalt, disconnected from the wider street grid too. They'd be more attractive if they were more like the complexes I saw while living in Munich: more green up front, car parking basically all underground.

* Require substantial backyards/courtyards for said complexes.

* More tenant protections that prevent landlords from arbitrarily non-renewing a lease, so that people in apartments can have long-term stability. If you break the rules repeatedly or severely, then sure, landlords should be able to remove you, but otherwise you should be left alone to live your life.

While in Munich, we lived in the Solln neighborhood. It's mostly apartments of some kind (we lived in an apartment, and then a backyard duplex), but they just look a lot less ugly than they typically do in the US. Example area: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Munich,+Germany/@48.081098...

> The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that.

Yup. I'm a weirdo who owns his home but wants a shit-ton more housing built in his city, even if it means my home value goes down. I do know some like-minded folks here, but I would be very surprised if we weren't in the minority.

And it makes sense. We're taught (in the US) to treat our primary residence as an investment, and for most US homeowners it's the most expensive asset they'll ever own, and will be their main vehicle for maintaining their wealth through their later years, and for transferring the remainder of that wealth to their children.

Given that, you'd either have to be self-sabotaging-ly altruistic, or otherwise wealthy enough (outside of your home) that a significant dip in your property's value doesn't tank your finances. I expect that describes a small number of people.

> In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments.

Existing property owners can only afford to hold this opinion because land rents are insufficiently taxed. Through some sort of monumental stupidity we decided to tax labor instead of land. In this sense the SFH, “Americans like suburbia” problem is just a function of poor tax strategy. If homeowners were faced with the economic reality of their choices then markets would fix land use by themselves.

That means the American Dream is unsustainable, and until people can break through the entrenched interests and do something rational, American cities will continue to decline.

Where else do we simply accept that incumbents get to have full protection from loss at the expense of literally everyone else? Certainly other examples exist but we certainly wouldn’t tolerate wheat farmers stopping their neighbors from growing wheat.

> In almost all cities land has run out

That's incredibly untrue. There are numerous cities, even in CA and NY, that have plenty of room for new single family homes.

The response to that is usually some variant of "eww, gross".

No, we threw it away because executives wanted their control fantasy of being able to push people around like little chess pieces, as opposed to setting a vision, hiring professionals, and then giving them the tools to achieve the vision and staying the hell out of their way.

Changing the excessively huge (and probably financially needed) capital gains deduction for selling a home and buying a new one to only work if you literally buy new construction - would probably spur something.

Existing stock would be depressed in value as the pool of buyers would be smaller, but they'd be more likely to be first time buyers anyway (no capital gains to deal with) and demand for new would increase.

But you could end up with insane inversions where existing stock was pulled down to build new to take advantage of the gains exclusion.

It should be much more punishing from the 4th home like 45%. One can understand 2/3 homes, e.g., one to live in and the rest as investment for retirement income. More than that is just greed. Also, if you don't live in one of your properties, either sell one to keep the total number within 3 or pay additional tax.

> 100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties.

Is that really true in the US?

5–10× the ROI of the S&P 500 - which is really only true because we allow massive leverage on real estate that we'd not on stocks themselves.

And leverage brings all the problems associated with it; if you own your house outright and it goes down %10 you're out 10%; if you only have 10% equity and the same happens you're down 100%. The gains, of course, work similarly which is why for so long it's been a heads I win, tails I win.

>China did "over" solve it by building loads of houses, so everyone's house value just crippled down like crazy.

That's not really a bad thing unless you believe real estate should be a vehicle for investment. However, in T1 and T2 cities asset prices are roughly on par with western major metro areas. However, property management fees tend to be lower. I suspect the Hukou system contributes significantly to keep housing affordable, and it's not just the massive supply.

Have you read anything on this you could point me to?

Yeah, start wars with NATO allies and people will flee your country like it's 1940.

We're not supposed to notice that the best thing about migrants (especially the illegal ones!) is that you can cram them 10+ to a house in squalid living conditions that would be abhorrent to most.

It's a price we're willing to pay since we're not paying it.

You would feel that, but you would be wrong.

Small businesses are often just as ruthless as large ones, just less competent. In any case, most rental properties are managed through agencies, who are soulless profit-optimisers.

It's the opposite in the UK. Most landlords are individuals, own one or maybe a couple of properties.

It's awful, rogue landlords who do everything they can to not do repairs or improvements and when they do it often comes after a long time. Often as they have underestimated all the expenses they're liable for and find that the profit is not very much.

Give me a company that owns a whole block every day, they've modelled the risk better, have economies of scale, and you have more recourse against them.

> I feel like there will be a difference between a handful of large corporations owning a majority of properties vs thousands of dentists and software engineers. Are you saying that all of these property owners are also soulless profit-optimizers?

Do we want to trade crazy high prices in the American real estate market for absolutely crazier high prices in the Australian real estate market?

That is a bit simplistic though, there could be other things going on in Australia, and all the other rich countries (e.g. Switzerland, England, China) where American prices look like a good value. I'm sure at the end of the day supply is the main factor, and not having a hot economy also helps, so I'm sure the USA will get there fairly quickly.

You have to completely satiate the demand for luxury housing before it becomes "desirable" to build new standard housing. In years past the "starter home" market has completely been reselling past housing, even what was lux at the time of building.

Why would you spend your time and effort building a house that earns you $50k when for the same time and effort you could build a house that earns you $150k?

You'd only do the first if the second wasn't available.

The government in this case being your city council

Where do you stand on encryption? Do you feel like the "I have nothing to hide" argument has any merit? If you think people have the right to privacy, why should real estate be an exception? I personally find the fact that real estate ownership is public in the US to be quite bizarre.

I have a friend who has someone who has repeatedly threatened to assault her, and her primary protection is keeping her address hidden from him. Should she never be allowed to own a house at risk of being assaulted?

> or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.

Costs about 200$ at most places and can be done online.

People who have been stalked or are uncomfortable having their details published for the world to find need privacy.

Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.

Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.

I feel like mortgage lenders should legitimately wonder why they’re lending to an LLC or a trust rather than an individual. I’m not sure there’s a good answer.

https://legalclarity.org/how-can-you-find-out-who-owns-a-bus...

I agree in principle, but companies (and individual very rich people) are amazingly inventive when it comes to finding loopholes in the "nuance".

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses.

> Universities typically own housing as well.

I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

Ideally, it should not be possible for random hateful people to easily get name/address records from local governments, but that's unfortunately not the world we live in yet.

You should be allowed to do whatever you want, by default. Preventing things only make sense if there's good reason to.

Otherwise everything you do, you have to first think about whether you are allowed to, like a slave.

There are lots of benefits to putting your home into a living trust. It just has one side effect of hiding your name on public GIS of tax parcels. One reason to do a trust is so that you can alter who benefits from it without amending a will.

You are right, it is completely absurd. And it's great! Anonymous companies and tax havens (domestic and international) are something completely contrary to how society at large is organized. And it is the best thing which has ever been invented. They are accessible to any person who has about a thousand dollars, no matter your race, sex, age, ethnicity, family name, political affiliation, or any other factors except that tiny sum. If you're not born into wealth or into a politically connected family, making an LLC is the only opportunity you have in life to not be a human battery in the Matrix. And it's easily accessible to anyone. Incredible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532033

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532004

It costs relatively little to create an LLC. This is not an uncommon pattern for people in groups commonly targeted by hate-motivated doxing and similar attacks. This is not a "rich-person trick", and if you can afford a house, the cost of an LLC is a very tiny expense by comparison.

We need more rental units, and it isn't clear how that policy would help the situation.

"The key is increasing supply" assumes the goal of new housing laws should be to increase supply and bring house prices down. But a lot of people do not agree with that goal. Many people are homeowners who will get tens of thousands of dollars richer if there is less supply and prices rise. And in America at least, homeowners have more votes than renters or builders or landlords or the homeless or other groups. So new housing law tends to favor the goals of homeowners, not the goals of other groups who want more supply.

I suppose that depends on the way the property tax system works. Paying 1-2% property tax each year on empty land does not seem like a path to riches.

"From" other countries is overly broad and I assume not what you intended. I am actually interested though in the idea of legislating how frequently home owners have to actually be within range of the home, for example. A friend has had a hell of a time with a landlord in Malaysia who's never seen the property.

I'm not sure we'll get china to buy our debt if we do this

related to: Warren Buffett's Thriftville

Its even done in some US territories!

Feel like that would be cancelled out by the opportunity cost of high network individuals not spending in the area.

Do the math of what it costs a city per resident - napkin math it, total tax intake divided by population. Now compare that to the additional taxes and money that person (who is wealthy) is not injecting into your city.

So out of touch to think the net spend of a gov directly on an individual would be worth sacrificing all of that additional capital injected to your other neighbors and their businesses.

Except land is one of a city's most important resources, and they often aren't paying much property tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13).

Yes but the area would collect far more revenue overall if an individual of commensurate means was actually dwelling within the dwelling.

Right. There are good financial reasons to own a home even if you don't think it's going to be a great investment, just as there are very good reasons not to own a home even if you have the means. It's the absolute, which is the premise of this policy proposal, that's the problem.

I agree philosophically though there is a lot that can be done short of upending the entire American wealth structure like removing barriers to housing construction (to dramatically increase supply) as well as subsidizing first time buyers eg with preferential mortgage rates and tax write offs.

Look into Trump Ocean Club in Panama. Openly popular for drug cartel money.

The vast majority of home purchases aren't from speculators or institutional investors.

Institutional investors only own about 0.5% of homes. If they're forced to stop buying, nothing will really change in a noticeable way. At best, small landlords and investors will scoop attractive properties up for slightly less.

The only way that prices could go waaay down is if the supply of new homes increases or demand decreases (or some combination of both).

Which of those do you think is likely as a result of the proposed action, and why?

Nonsense. Do you think these landlords intentionally overpaid for the properties? They are sophisticated entities who like to pay at or below fair value.

God forbid someone not sell out of their home. /s Home ownership isn't exactly a crappy life milestone to be stuck at. Yeah it would suck for a select few people who need to get out of one and into another RFN due to life reasons and surely some municipalities would leverage that to really screw people but I think the upside is orders of magnitude higher than the downside.

Come to think of it, I bet making homes less liquid would knock the divorce rate down more than anyone wants to believe it would, lol

Not that I expect this particular strategy from this administration, but there's 'forced' as in "you WILL sell this property", and there's 'forced' as in "any corporate owned housing unit will see its property tax rate increase by 25% per year until it is sold to a person". I don't think your description could apply to the latter.

The Comrade Trump memes would go crazy

These homes going back on the market wouldn't make a dent in housing prices. As much as we'd like to think that corporations are to blame, that's not reality. Plenty of middle class families own homes and vote for local politicians to keep their investment safe (and for it to increase in value) by making it hard to build.

Your housing affordability plan is that everyone who rents from a corporation gets evicted?

As far as I can tell, LVT only achieves what it sets out to do if it’s equivalent to market rent.

As in, you never really “own” your land, you’re just renting it from the sovereign. If you can’t make good enough use out of it to afford that rent, you should move on. You can find comments on this thread that make this argument explicitly in terms of “maximizing land use efficiency”.

This was the economic structure of feudalism. It … wasn’t great. Private ownership of land has its own tradeoffs but a few centuries of historical experimentation in both directions has been fairly decisive.

LVT is a tax on the value of the land specifically, not a traditional property tax. This encourages development on valuable land that is currently being put to unproductive uses.

For example, if you own a lot in a downtown metro which is a parking lot you pay low property taxes because parking lots have low property values. You are disincentivised to develop it because your property tax would go up. Opposite incentives with a LVT.

It could be substantial just by increasing the number of occupied dwelling units - if institutional investors are willing to let housing sit empty for 6 months or a year (because it doesn't hit them where it hurts) and the average vacancy rate in a city is hovering around 10%, dropping that down to 5% will really shake up prices.

You don't even need a drop; you just need prices to stay stable for a decade or so, and inflation will "drop" the real cost of new ownership.

That's not the point.

He's issued plenty of other executive orders that aren't legal in order to continue to bullshit his base. The reason why he's deferring to congress now (instead of trying to take credit) is because he knows it's not possible and can use that as leverage against members of Congress.

Just think of the shit he's going to throw against the wall when it's only a few months away. I bet he'll wade into "Cancelling all student loans" or "Legalizing Marijuana" knowing his base is too stupid to understand his intentions.

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern

There's certainly SWE jobs in LCOL places but even if there weren't, one's savings from a HCOL area should go pretty far in a LCOL one. Also, thinking that you can't get a mortgage off working at Subway in a small town is just out of touch. You'd probably have to work a lot longer than a cushy SWE job, but it's still possible.

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from

It's strange to me that moving to LCOL wasn't a much bigger thing during the period when everyone was working remotely.

I think that it should be a ramping rate, the idea being that a 1x landlord should be able to outbid a 2x landlord and so on.

In theory this encourages a sort of spreading effect where at some point the Nth property is too expensive to buy to rent or speculate on, which naturally stops the exponential effect of making land lording your full time gig by continuously expanding the portfolio.

They already are.

As someone who generally hates taxes I support this. Taxes at best should be used to discourage externalities and rent seeking.

However, California even tried to repeal prop13 for non primary residence and it failed! So i'm not sure how popular this idea is.

Capitalists hate him! Use this one weird trick to...

The two times I’ve stayed in an apartment complex, they had staff onsite and repairmen and someone on call. The individual landlord doing this on the side is likely undercapitalized and operating on thin margins and not budgeting for repairs

That’s already a thing. Property Management companies charge landlords around 50% of the first month rent for a new tenant and 10% of the rent to manage the property for the landlord.

They also charge a lease renewal fee.

Then expand the scope to include all interested parties in the chain, whether owners or service providers.

I think the point is that he said he’d do it, and he’ll campaign that it’s done, even if nothing happens.

This is not how the law works. The president shouldn’t be able to do stuff and ask Congress to sign off on afterwards

> In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban,

I didn't know about this use-case. But this is also what investors do with real estate in California because Prop 13 resets the taxable value on a real estate sales, but not on buying an LLC that holes the real estate.

LOL, you live in California? The past affordability you are talking about was not universal. There were plenty of people happily buying homes after moving out of CA to other states.

Anyhow, interest rates are the root cause now. Who in their right mind would do the trade I've described?

Eh? I'm not talking about investing in your own home, but buying them simply as profit vehicles with no intention of living in them.

Well, the primary incentive today, for most people, is a place to live. Profit just skews the preference on how that is accomplished.

More specifically, the current zoning of metropolitan areas is the problem. US cities have plenty of potential for more housing, they just won't allow it to be built.

The most absurd example is here in SF, where... okay, context. A recently-passed state law overriding local zoning means that there's a high-rise building project in the Marina district (https://sfyimby.com/2025/12/preliminary-permits-filed-for-fo...) that will almost certainly get built, despite people endlessly protesting it. It will add 790 apartments, 86 of which will be required to be affordable housing.

Before this, in 2024, there were 7 net housing units added for the entire year in the Marina District. No typo there, literally just 7, in the most expensive neighborhood in the city, in the most expensive city in the country.

This one building, only possible because the state overrode local zoning, will be adding by itself more than 100 years worth of new housing to the neighborhood. That's how fucked the approval process is.

Tariffs on products like lumber and cabinetry were introduced or raise on January 1st of this year. It's an additional factor that will make a bad situation worse.

You can't tell me that increasing the pricing of construction materials won't have negative pressure on home construction.

> Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50% of this is likely materials, with likely a minority of the materials tariffed.

And where does the construction equipment come from? The parts to repair that construction equipment? The parts that go into the trucks that the workers drive to the job site?

Focusing on a single input is myopic when the tariffs are so widespread that they touch everything.

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

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

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

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

Yeah, all the politicians talking housing— the actual net governmental effect on housing is to massively constrain supply (quantity) in service of rather arbitrary qualitative standards. I’m all for “the building shouldn’t spontaneously collapse” standards, but … two acre lots? Restrictions on casting shadows? Accessory dwelling units? Nah. If the government wants to make a difference it should ban Euclidian zoning as it currently is practiced, full stop.

Making this decision as a politician in this country is death to your career though; how could we incentivize our leaders to bite the hand that elects them?

> The material costs are high too because of regulations that require specific lumber for framing etc.

Having done some extensive remodeling and building work in recent years and going to great lengths to follow building codes, this just isn't it. The type of lumber you can use for most framing jobs isn't that special. Having walked through a number of new construction properties and seeing what passes code, I don't think relaxing lumber standards would be a good idea, nor buy us anything.

When lumber, cabinetry, and other building products have tariffs in the range of 10-50%, you can't tell me that tariffs are not the primary problem driving costs up right now. There just isn't a secret stash of lesser grade lumber lying around that would also be perfectly good for building homes.

This. They don't want the local septic man and the local roofer partnering up to GC a development of a dozen houses or even worse, an individual doing the bulk of the work of building anything, so they get it all saddled with requirements that amortize away nicely when vertically integrated but absolutely crush anyone else.

There are examples of entire subdivisions being built to order for private investors to rent out. It’s called “built to rent.”

https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/commercial...

Corporate ownership mapped:

https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/who-owns-amer...

https://storage.pardot.com/153411/17634993251KmjZ4d2/whoa_ma...

> The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years.

If construction was stagnant for 60 years, adding 10-50% tariffs on lumber and building materials would only make it worse. Not motivated reasoning, just basic economics.

The new tariffs went into effect January 1st, by the way. If you thought things were bad now, they're about to get worse.

This announcement is just another distraction. They want you mad at Wall St, not tariffs.

> In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars,

No it's not.

If this was true you'd see it in some other countries. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Unless you redefine automobile to mean a tiny cart with a 5HP motor and some seats.

> governed by how much a bank will lend [...] Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years.

Banks typically won't hold onto to your loan for 30 years. Mortgages in the US have been thoroughly fiscalized: your typical bank/mortgage lender bundles up a bunch of loans and sells them to another servicing party as soon as the ink dries on the closing documents. The specialized servicer package them, and offer them as securities to investors who in turn will get a monthly return based on aggregate mortgage installments.

All this to say: lending banks would be happy to finance thousands upon thousands of 5-digit mortgages, and sell those to securitization specialists.

New houses aren't built in existing neighborhoods because dense housing is unpopular, as is a distaste of having "poorer" people as neighbors. Static zoning, terrible transport networks and no funding for new public infrastructure tag-team to discourage new developments on undeveloped farmland.

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

$2,500 cars? $10,000 houses? I found the time traveler from 1960!

Source that cars are buildable for a few thousand dollars to the existing laws?

Even the Slate truck is $25,000 because safety features are required.

All housing is investment due to the way it's owned, regardless of who owns it. For most people, it's by far their biggest investment, resulting in extreme political activity.

We must confront that fact, or negate it, for example by taxing away the investment opportunity.

Investors buy housing to rent it out to others, that's the investment. People who own their own home implicitly pay themselves rent, by choosing to live in what they own versus renting instead.

Getting non-resident owners out of housing only means that renters have been banned from an area.

actually, they are actively beneficial owners. They can do things more efficiently than small time owners.

Well as soon as you find someone who can speak about the future of the housing market without speculating, let me know.

“Built to rent” lately occurs in the sun belt and Midwest, in which fall most of the swing states.

It's also what you'd do if you wanted to buy an inexpensive house and have a low cost of living.