What about banks, real-estate, and just random big companies?
There are companies that are crowd funding buying homes too, where the person is the investor and earns dividends on it. It’s getting insane.
Out in Silicon Valley people were pitching these all the time. They’re also popular with medical doctors from what I hear. I got pitched by a guy driving a top of the line Tesla Model S as an Uber driver years ago - he said he was driving for Uber just to meet potential investors.
Slightly OT, but recently (at a cannabis dispensary oddly enough), I overheard a guy in full hunting camo talk about how he day traded in the deer stand. The investor class is fucking weird.
I thought the same. Is there data somewhere to suggest hedge funds specifically own more than the others?
Hedge funds have been disproportionate buyers of single-family homes over the last few years.
Traditionally, real estate investment funds didn’t own single family homes to rent. Most companies with single family home exposure were builders.
There’s still a ton of other multi-family and apartment REITs out there, but I believe they’re not being targetting both because they’ve existed for a long while and also because usually a person looking for a family home doesn’t buy the entire apartment building.
Here’s a source with some more info: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
I have no idea who down voted you. Let me find some…
Edit: https://reiclub.com/articles/single-family-houses-the-5-biggest-buyers-in-america/
Banks usually own them only for the time they’re for sale after being seized from an owner that defaulted on their payment, no?
Directly, no. Indirectly, yes.
https://www.ftadviser.com/property/2021/07/07/lloyds-makes-private-rental-debut-with-new-venture/
Now ban non hotel licensed entities from renting living spaces for less than a month
Fuck that Air BnB shit
Good, now find a way to make the Republicans let it pass.
For every single-family home a hedge fund owns over a certain limit each year, it would be subject to a tax penalty, the revenues from which would be used for down payment assistance programs for those seeking to buy their first home from a hedge fund.
Sounds like even if this gets passed, whatever penalties get assessed are just going right back to the hedge funds anyway? And it’s a 10-year plan… Kinda sounds like a whole lotta nothing. Disappointing.
They need to change the property tax system to tax non occupant owners a much higher rate and lower the rates for owner occupants. Add a big penalty on top of that for vacant non occupant owned houses. Punish them for hoarding vacant houses to artificially inflate prices.
So the goal is to push up rents relative to ownership? Why is it that the solution to the problems of capitalism always seems to be shifting around how poor people give money to rich people?
Just flat out say no corporation is allowed to have ownership or controlling interest in any SFH. Period. No incentives. You have a few years to divest until the property is auctioned off.
It’s not a perfect solution. Maybe not the best. But I’m so tired of pretending all we can do is basically nothing.
Capitalism is wonderful when everyone is on similar footing, but the natural result is to concentrate wealth which breaks the system. I don’t hate capitalism, but we are too far into the late-stage broken part and we need a way to reset that ideally doesn’t involve violent revolt. Eventually people get sick of living under the boot of a situation created by their ancestors and which they’ve received nothing beneficial from. Concentrated wealth and generational wealth needs to go away. People like Musk and Trump are only problems because they were born to more wealth than most people will ever know.
Get rid of that shit and redistribute their wealth to the people and that will fix so many of our problems.
Wealth trickling up is the nature of Capitalism. If I start with ten and you start with ten, and I sell you something worth 2 for 4, I now have more wealth because I’ve just gained $2 profit and you’ve lost $2 of value on your goods.
This will continue to snowball and accumulate. It’s baked into physics.
Not saying Capitalism can’t work. But it has to be heavily regulated and we need a wealth cap. Hence Bernie suggesting anyting over $1 billion gets taxed at 100%. I favor a logerethmic approach using a soft cap on earnings and counting investments as earnings. Basically, the closer to X amount you make each year, the less you take home. You never hit the cap, but you might be keeping pennies on the dollar the closer you get to it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
That would affect a lot of farmers. A farm is a business, and even smaller farmers (what’s left of them, anyway; doing this isn’t going to help) often own their land and buildings under a corporate structure owned entirely by themselves.
If it could be limited to corporate structure with more than a few shareholders, that could work.
The way our system is structured that even a good intention law like this, someone would find a loop hole around it. Lawyers lawyer.
been saying this over and over for a while now
Make the 3rd home any entity owns taxed at 50% property tax rate. Make it prohibitively expensive to try and turn the American Dream into a subscription model.
This is not for us. This is for your children who will otherwise “own nothing and be happy”.
I want to believe…but I can’t. I’m glad someone put the bill out there. But there is no way this gets bipartisan support or gets pushed through in any way. It will die in the halls of our inept, depraved, corrupt government.
The chance of any bill passing is about 30% regardless of what level of public support it has.
The same is not true when you compare the chances to the support the rich have for a bill. When the rich support a bill its far more likely to pass. When the rich oppose a bill, it is far more likely to fail.
So it will be no surprise when this bill unfortunately fails.
Expect better, agitate for it. Get excited for a livable future. Write letters and make phone calls. Go to a protest. Resolving to do even one of these in a year puts among the rarefied few who actually put in the extra 10% effort to move progress incrementally forward.
