You’re providing the service of doing all that installation and restoration. You should be compensated for your efforts. You can do that work a lot more efficiently when you’re not beholden to a specific client’s needs or wants, you just want to get another affordable home onto the market.
Providing a shittier product that fits a clients’ needs worse so that you can profit is not efficiency.
We have a severe lack of homes that are affordable for people who work most of the time and don’t have the time or the savings to restore a home themselves, but might have the savings to make a down payment on a completed restored home. Not everyone has the same means, and we should be using our side hustle to help the world we live in, not hurt it.
Again, no. You are not helping anyone when you invest in the housing market and try and make a profit off a limited commodity. All you are doing is driving up the prices with your profit seeking and making it harder for people to afford a down payment.
You’re not investing in the housing market by buying bottom-of-the-barrel, derelict homes that no investor or resident would ever buy. Those buildings have fallen out of what could be considered housing, and you’re restoring them to use.
This is the same argument as saying nobody should buy old broken watches to restore, for example.
Also, driving up the prices??? You’re ADDING to the supply curve without touching the demand curve at all. Any theory of economics shows that prices will decrease when you do that. You have zero idea what you’re talking about
No house flipper is buying bottom of the barrel derelict homes that no one would ever want because those are hard to flip.
If you’re truly saving a property that’s literally sitting abandoned and unused and falling apart without you being there and restoring it, then yes, you are providing a service. If you’re instead just buying a fixer upper that literally any starting couple might want, then no, you’re not.
i.e. house flippers do not increase supply because by and large they do not buy out-of-market assets and restore them to in-market assets, they buy low in the market assets and try and flip them as cheaply as possible into slightly higher in the market assets.
I think the key is that unless you’re already a general contractor, you’re a speculator. There exists people fixing shitholes to be livable, but those guys margins come from the fact that they already are in the remodeling business and can fix it for cheaper. I’ve worked with both types in building supply.
