Comment by roadside_picnic

It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in order to raise or lower prices in an area, or using other mechanics to manipulate pricing, across the entire market, depending on the intended actions. If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area, if they intend to rent, they can afford to impose artificial scarcity until they force renters to meet their rates, and so on.

Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down, nor do they have the capabilities to influence markets. Even tiny percentage shifts can result in significant fluctuations in the prices consumers see. It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence.

I don't think that's quite what the comment is claiming. They're not saying that some small portion of homeowners are working together to raise prices. I think they're more talking about the concept of "marginal buyers." It's the marginal buyer that sets prices, not the average buyer. And particularly when supply is heavily restricted, the marginal buyers can be a very tiny portion of all buyers, and can look very different from the average buyer.

Define "tiny portion of the market", especially "market".

There are many houses in the US. Not all of them are for sale. There's a difference between having a "tiny portion of the market" when you define "the market" as all houses in the US, and "tiny portion of the market" when you define "the market" as the houses that are actively being bought and sold. I would not be surprised if corporate involvement was a significantly higher proportion of the latter rather than the former.

It takes a lot less to put your thumb on the scale of the "liquid" portion of a stock if it is significantly smaller in size than the total stock.

That's the problem, they don't care if people will buy or rent them. They literally just sit on them writing off any losses against other business units.

When enough institutional investors are all doing that same thing, the market suppply becomes restricted, especially in focused regional areas. It ends up indistinguishable from collusionary antitrust, though there's no actual communicated collusion so it's not technically illegal. In a normal situation like that, all it takes is a single participant to cave and drops prices to take advantage of the demand. But in this case the institutional investors can keep taking the losses indefinitely so no one ever feels the need or benefit to "break" first, and they can maintain it forever.

I generally agree with you on market discussions, but I don't think you're considering this one correctly. Imagine a country responsible for just 10% of global oil production decided to stop producing. What's going to happen oil prices assuming no other country starts producing more?

They're going to skyrocket in a seemingly irrational way. But it's completely rational. The reason is that they're a finite resource that is needed, and so there is very minimal price elasticity. People will pay as low as they can, but simultaneously must have oil and so have a practically uncapped price ceiling if that's all that's available. The same is true of housing.

You're right that people won't, generally speaking, buy a house for $100 when there's another one for sale for $80. But what you've done there is greatly increase the demand for that $80 house, which is now going to naturally send its price upwards.

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Finally there's the issue that figures on the percent of homes that are owned by investment groups are misleading, because they aren't just buying homes randomly. They're going to pick up lots of houses in precise areas, and so the impact on prohibiting this behavior will be dramatic in these areas.

Going by the graph in the article, that's still ~13% of homes owned by investors with >5 properties. And that's total of what is currently held, it speaks nothing of liquidity. That number likely includes investors who have had that property for a long time, the current property buy-up likely means far greater than 13% of the market right now is going to those sorts of aggregators.

Dropping the price of a house by a few percentage points can be the make-or-break for some families. And small changes in availability can have large impacts on price.

If we banned (or severely penalized) all entities from owning more than 5 residential homes, this would probably reduce cost by a few percentage points across the board. That's thousands of dollars.

Personally, I think unoccupied homes in general ought to be penalized (beyond just tax burden, an actual vacancy tax).

The thing is that there is only a tiny portion of houses ever selling at any time. The only ones that would benefit from selling are people who are downsizing or moving away.

If you buy 60% of the properties on market, the rest will see this and adjust their own prices. Usually this only works when the macro is favourable (low interest rates, easy mortgage applications, etc.), but it is definitely a large factor. It sometimes creates a even hotter market, with people thinking that real estate goes up forever, then they sell.

You're right that it's not always large investment groups. Vancouver in Canada had the same thing happen, but mostly from foreign investors and criminals washing money. The latter was facilitated by politicians who cashed in big on this.

But if you bought that tiny portion of the total market all at once or in concentrated areas you better believe you can influence it.

https://papersourceonline.com/wall-street-has-spent-billions...

https://www.kut.org/texasstandard/2022-06-14/texas-home-sale...

> People won't buy them when there's another house for less.

As others have pointed out housing markets are illiquid and tend to have a limited set of sellers at any given time such that the race-to-the-bottom doesn’t happen very often.

Rather, an institutional investor buys high on houses in desired neighborhoods then charge high rents on their portfolio. Subsequent sellers in the same neighborhood see the high closing price and ask for even more.

You don't have to control the whole market to manipulate it. Housing is localized and the ideal situation is people hold onto their homes for decades before going on the market again and spend months if not years looking at purchasing a home. But investments into single family homes operates on completely different timescales and pace with an entirely separate list of considerations and values.

When a strongly capitalized minority cohort can sustain positions that are untenable for normal market participants, they can act as a kingmaker by shaping outcomes at the margin.

There won't BE another house for less, because of the way the real estate market works. If a house goes up in price, others do to.

The theater on fire has a small exit door.

It can in an extremely illiquid market.

Noah Smith on "Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high", with nice things to say about Thompson:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/corporations-arent-the-reason-...

Quoting Thompson:

"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common confusion: The investment firm Blackstone, not BlackRock, established Invitation Homes. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)

Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."

I think specifically spoken like someone who saw The Big Short very recently

The truth is that BlackRock buying rental properties is the opposite of that. The foundation of the MBS market is in its name: mortgages.

You can substitute cocoa sources globally, but you can't substitute a house in Charlotte with one in Phoenix.

If cocoa prices spike, you buy less chocolate. If housing prices spike in your job market, your options are: pay more, endure a brutal commute, or uproot your life. The demand is far more inelastic.

> Gold, cocoa, mustard seed, electricity

I can easily live a full and meaningful life without owning gold, drinking cocoa or eating mustard. Those aren't essential and have decent substitutes.

Electricity is essential, just like housing and it's very highly regulated.

Just curious, where do you live that electricity is sold in an open market? Seems like a very strange setup.

Another thing: Residential homes are never considered liquid assets. They don't need professional market makers.

It’s not gobbledygook. I think for most people it’s hard to grasp the scale of the entire industries outside of their area of professional expertise so you can look at some numbers here:

https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/mortgage-market-and-hous...

https://www.sifma.org/issues/market-structure/housing-financ...

What I don't understand is how this new type of asset is above reproach.

I mean BlackRock and Blackstone creating securities backed by real estate in general, not only single family homes.

What if this new type of asset signals to the broader real estate market that regulators favor large investors?

Even more likely, what if this new type of asset succeeds at the expense of first time home buyers?

No, the real problem is that the vast majority of their income does not come from their role in creating supply or maintaining housing.

Proof: Propose a 100% land value tax, which definitionally only removes that part of income that is generated by the community around their property, and see if they go for it.

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

They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. But sure they maintain houses. Although just the bare minimum, they will never fix it nicely - just enough to rent it out.

"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property.

Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.

> if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it

One thing to keep in mind. It might be that it's "democratic" in that all the homeowners are allowed to vote for or against the zoning policy (or for or against the local leaders who set zoning policy) but ONLY the local homeowners are allowed to vote. Those who rent (or who can't even afford to rent) live in a different district and aren't allowed to participate in the election.

If that's the case, then voting doesn't represent "the will of the people", just the will of those people permitted to participate.

> This is basically a maximum wage for landlords

Well sure, but it's good to incentivize looking for sources of wages other than (literally) rent-seeking.

The municipality cares about the taxes, sure but it goes far beyond that. Literally everyone in every department is more convenienced by attracting the well off and being hostile to those who aren't. Those rich people in those big houses with their big assets are much "easier to own" for the town than a bunch of rowdy generally noncompliant trailer trash who crank out a bunch of kids who need services, have poor elderly who need services, don't goose step in line without a bunch of enforcement, can't pay the taxes to pay for the "do we really need this" equipment and facilities government always wants, the working parents can't pick up the slack if the schools slip and scores will show it, etc, etc, etc.

Growing municipalities kind of have to choose if they want to become bedroom communities or industrial/business communities and if they choose the former optimizing for rich people is the easy lazy not sticking their neck out choice and what does government employment optimize for if not retaining people disposed toward that sort of decision making.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean by secret society, but I could well imagine that these kind of limits would be hard to enforce. Like a person creates shell corporations to own their properties on their behalf, or buys them in the name of their kids, or employs randos to "own" pieces of their portfolio.

> landlords are rent seeking and nothing else

Noone says it's nothing else. But rent seeking is a big component of it, you just focus on other minor parts.

In general, locking down some limited but critical commodity (e.g. land) is bad for any economic system. It doesn't really matter whether it's "Wall Street" or "your neighbor". A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value.

> they do create supply and maintain housing.

Clearly you have never interacted with most land lords

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Renting should be viewed is a negative in society. Imagine if car dealerships moved to a rental model instead of ownership..oh wait, they sort of already are, they just call it "financing", they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion.

Rent income is not wages, that's the critical part you're mistaken. Income and wages are not the same thing. Rent income is as much wages as Elon Musk selling stocks is to him, or a bank making income on interest payments. Renting is a business, it's income is business revenue, not wages.

There is this terrible view that landlords are "just like you and me, hard working regular people" - not that it's false, but so are the people that own mom & pops shops, or a local subway franchise, they're all business owners making business profits, not wages.

Business practices that harm the public should be regulated and curtailed. With taxis for example, the medallion system was used to limit the number of Taxis in operation. Similarly, not only should an individual be limited to (directly or via an ownership/shareholder interest in a company -- even with them or their family) a reasonable number of properties, but the number of rental properties in an area should itself be limited. Property owners can either sell houses, or sell condos and make income via condo (regulated) condo fees.

Food, shelter, health-care/medicine should be heavily regulated, if private parties take part as intermediaries between individuals and their food, shelter, health-care, they should expect lots of red-tape and limits. Ideally, the government itself would be driving these markets directly by building and selling properties, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc.. that's not socialism or communism. That's just common-sense capitalism, everyone, especially the richest make more money this way. not only that their money will spend better this way.

The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab. The kind where if fully realized, you'll build your own mansions and sky scrapers but you'd be complaining about the slums and crime nearby, how you can't get good help, skilled labor, and spend a ton of money on bribes instead of paying a fraction of that in taxes.

In theory, reaganism and trickle-down economics could have worked. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats. But in reality, it's more of the "scorpion and the frog" story. In this case, landlords can own a reasonable number of decent homes and make decent income, and then diversify the money in other markets. But currently, it's a race to become the biggest slumlord or until the markets collapse again.

If nothing else, landlords should be held to much stricter standards for maintenance and the overall state of their properties.

What’d make sense for me is if a rental has a documented history of being poorly maintained, past some threshold the property can be auctioned off, with the proceeds going towards funding public housing. This should help filter slumlords and bare-minimum-effort speculators.

So you created a policy that takes money from the lower/working classes and those on welfare (restricting rental supply for those who rent) and transfers it as a tax subsidy to the middle class (who own) and are offering this up as "good" policy?

You've also encouraged your middle class to massively over-leverage themselves to a single house/apartment by creating a huge tax subsidy for them (from 30-75%), which will no doubt continue placing upward pressure on house prices and also create risks if interest rates increase. Why would you not take the biggest loan the bank will offer, given interest rates are quite low in Europe and you will not be taxed on most of the value of that property you can acquire with leverage?

Crazy thought, did your politicians ever think about the idea of NOT subsidizing the demand side at all? If the issue is the price of housing, subsidizing demand for it in any way is going to make that problem worse!

> So now it's super-expensive to rent

And as if it was ordered, a news story[1] on exactly that this morning. Last year alone the average price for a rental unit went up 6.3%, and simultaneously a record number of apartments were sold. So very unlikely to come down.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner...

> Landlord, or property management,

This is literally not true.

A landlord owns the property. Property managers operate the property. Sometimes these are the same people (in mom and pop scenarios), but typically and at scale they certainly are not.

Property management is a job. Landlording is not. It is simply owning an asset.

+1 on taxing land though.

> Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have.

Let's ignore property management for now and focus on landlords (i.e. people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job. Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking.

No. If you want affordability, make the government efficient and tax people LESS.

The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax.

This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.

This is obviously correct. Somehow people just can't accept the pigeonhole principle that if X people are trying to buy Y houses and X>>Y, a lot of them are going to be disappointed regardless of what laws you pass.

> It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.

That's what people with disproportionate access to capital would want people to believe. It absolutely matters if there's a ceiling and a floor on the production rate of every aspect of the supply chain of housing. If it doesn't matter how many houses someone owns, then it wouldn't matter if builders don't outpace the ability for particularly wealthy people to borrow and own as much as they possibly can. It's a particular type of commodity that should be appropriately controlled in a way that reduces the whole "tragedy of the commons" type effect.

There's always a finite supply, and there's always some contingent of people who will try and get as much as they possibly can, leveraging as much generational wealth as they need to, if they need to.

There should absolutely be a limit on the number of homes, within a particular region, someone should be able to buy, as long as a sufficient threshold is met for what can reasonably be called a scarcity problem. If an individual average home of any type would require the mean family income to quadruple in order to service the mortage, or the downpayment would require 5x their annual salary pre-tax, that seems like a very liberal threshold.

Would it not also lower house prices, causing would-be renters to buy instead, reducing demand for rentals?

This will release homes on the market, which will lower the prices, causing the rents to drop.

but it'll lower mortgages, which will lower rents.

>that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals

As someone that's renting because buying is impossible i think this would be fantastic. They should do it with Airbnb too.

Not American or in the US, this is problem everywhere now. People thinking they're entrepreneurs for gouging.

People will come up with all kinds of reasoning, its the property tax, it's migrants, its minimum wage, it's millennials, it's inflation ,when ultimately it's just that landlords will charge whatever they think they can get away.

and sometimes they'll try to charge in other ways...

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/...

Ironically, supply would probably increase for no other reason than those are the kind of people who just add cash only units without giving a crap about expensive permission and permits.

> also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything.

Nothing like middle school economics to help a debate along ... have you checked on the level of economic activity that is due to those 30M foreign nationals, and considered if there might be any downsides to them no longer being here (and presumably not being replaced by other foreign nationals) ?

> A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system

I'm not sure this is true. Based on a couple articles I found, this is what the current situation looks like in USA:

a) Billionaires, (of whom there are about 1,000) own about 5% of the wealth

b) Millionaires, (of whom there are about 25 million, or 7% of the population, excluding billionaires) own about 74% of the wealth

This tracks with my impression of the rental market. Most rent money isn't going to the billionaires or big corporations, it's going to the 10 million or so mom-and-pop rental property owners.

I'm not an expert on this stuff by any means, but my intuition is that it's a cycle, wherein the rental system is one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality in the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentrat...

Landlords owning property is not a problem.

Correct.

It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system

To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.

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

Well-established effect and it applies to everything. A huge portion of all technological improvement/productivity gains and nearly all public investment money ultimately accrues to land rents which we then later just call "the cost of living."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

Couple things to add. First, rates are much lower when you’re leveraging 10,000 homes at 3:1. That allows you to purchase 20,000 additional homes, which isn’t something the normal individual can do. Second, most of this borrowing was done during the 0% interest days and when rates went up after Covid, a lot of the operations grinded to a halt. Third, there’s no regulatory environment for rent rates and rate increases.

This is a good point, and I was curious to see exact numbers on the invest vs be a landlord opportunity cost.

The rich person gets to rent the house, while the "newly weds" are living in it. And most importantly - the house itself will appreciate in value at a rate near 5%

Assuming they both buy a $500k house w/ a 20% down payment and a 5% loan. Realistically the young couple would get a worse rate but lets say they both get 5%. Monthly payment is $2,522.29 w/ taxes and insurance lets call it $3000 a month.

The newly weds are just eating that entire cost every month for 30 years, whereas the Rich landlord rents it out. After a quick and dirty Zillow search lets assume $3500 a month rent to start, so he's making $500 a month profit on an asset thats already increasing in value 5% ish per year.

So, with these assumptions: - Home cost increases 2% a year - Rental price increases 3% a year - Home value increases 5% a year

Total rental profit is $537k Final home value is $1.56 M Total Loan cost: $873k

Bringing the landlords return on 100k to be $1.224M in profit over 30 years (Final sell price - total loan cost + rental profit assuming they stuff it under a mattress). Whereas $100k at a 5% yearly return will be ~$430k

disclaimer: Im not the best with Excel and ive never actually bought property so im sure there are flaws in my math.

An intelligent investor wouldn't buy it outright, they'd get a mortgage with a lower than average interest rate. The appreciation of the home will cover the interest rate over the long run and the interest rate is a small price to pay for keeping most of that $100,000 liquid for other investments.

Aren’t you forgetting something, like hmm, rent and appreciation?

Except they do, as the original comment already said. The rich “person” has cash and access to much cheaper credit, is buying multiple properties, not paying the bills and earning rent, the other will have a mortgage.

Higher rent means more people will opt to buy. That's not necessarily a bad thing in perspective. Assuming the other side effect is a decrease in costs due to a lower profit margin.

That is a good point, and this tax would need to be well thought out. I specifically would increase the tax rate the more properties an entity owns (Not a lawyer so IDK how to treat one guy owning 10 companies as 1 entity the right way). That way smaller local landlord's can still exist (and keep rental prices competitive), but massive orgs will be forced to sell properties. The idea is to create a disincentive for hoarding properties in supply constraint markets.

Long term these non-occupants will sell as other properties are being purchased by x-renters.

I mentioned this in another comment but - this thread is interesting as it shows the differences in housing policies / issues in different parts of the country. I'm from the Midwest / Chicago where we have a lot more land to work with so the policies are slightly different.

That being said, it sounds like a land value tax might be a better approach to my first suggestion. Regardless, this would not effect people that truly "own and live in their only house"

Property taxes do not directly translate into rent, the % of the tax that is on the land value of the property can't be passed on, because the supply of land is inelastic.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-c...

Yes & no. Higher costs can obviously be passed onto consumers, but higher taxes make things a less attractive investment, too. The higher your costs regardless of whether a unit is occupied or not, the less interesting it is an an investment.

Where I live, condo's do not increase in value much due to HOA fees and taxes.

I just plugged in some numbers using (estimated) purchase price, taxes, HOA for the unit I'm in now, and it would cost me a little over $1M over 30 years to own a $300,000 1br apt.

The stock market goes up more than the housing market. When considering the return on investment for a house, remember the property taxes, insurance costs, maintenance costs, repair costs, 6% real estate commissions, and so on.

> 2) Would just inflate home prices.

That depends on demand. If no one wants to buy homes at the prices offered, prices will drop.

Just to reinforce this, the last place I lived in was owned by a corporation...of one man, who lived a town away in a modest house and worked as a paper pusher by day.

The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes"

> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse.

I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.

The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.

That's not really meaningless though. You just explained in more detail some attributes of corporations, many of which are precisely the things many people are criticizing when they criticize the fact that corporations own lots of housing. Of course we all know that there are still humans behind the corporations.

I've been told that, for privacy reasons, you should even buy your own home under an LLC as well

This suggests that a single-family home is generally a bad investment. Maybe not if you're living in the house yourself (no renter-landlord inefficiency), but still idk. Could make more sense in certain areas where all the value is in the land.

Indeed. This was discussed about a month ago. My prior comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208561

LLC may be a type of corporation but when people complain about corporations buying up homes they really mean C-corps, not LLCs owned by Uncle Bob who likes to flip houses.

The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes" Home many rich dads do you know with 12,500 homes?

Is there a difference?

Both are bad.

The complaint, real or imagined, is that young individuals aren’t building up capital. Home ownership was the bedrock of middle class assets.

Guaranteed those 100 individuals won't all raise their rent 10% (or whatever) on the same day, every n months.

I disagree with this logic. To take it to an extreme, if one person earning a million dollars per minute has moral value X, then a million people earning one dollar per minute has moral value X. I disagree on principle.

Just allow people and corporations to own any homes they build. That way we can all still hope to be landlords with a hundred homes.

So long as landlords grow their business by increasing the total stock of housing, no harm is done.

This comment always comes up when regulation is proposed: "But people will just game it!" The solution is not to throw our hands up and say "Well, we just can't regulate this!" The solution is to prevent the gaming, too. Laws should iterate as often as people find clever ways to work around their spirit.

But even by long term renting they’re driving up home prices.

Looking at the map one might conclude that big investors buying up single family homes is a recipe for affordable housing.

As they should be.

Ohhhh, sorry for my typo...

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

It means that blackstone cares about this, which means they like buying houses, which means it matters.

And the stock dropped 6% today. That is what matters.

Let's say Blackrock, with all their wealth behind them, buys a home in your neighborhood. What do you think they will charge for rent? Market average? Ha! No way. They jack up the rental prices because they can. That makes rental prices rise everywhere in the area.

More demand for homes makes homes more valuable and encourages more supply!

Why is this a problem? Build more homes, get rich from the Swedes!

It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal.

In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.

The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.

We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.

Here's a few examples:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi... https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corpora...

It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.

Rent would go through the roof and it would become even harder to get out of the rental trap. It's better to just have a very low hard cap on the number of properties anyone can own.

Institutional investors collectively nearly a million residential properties in the US, and continue to buy more. When turnover of inventory is only a couple percent a year, owning nearly 1% of the housing stock and not turning it over is a lot. Small landlord property turnover is much higher than institutions.

This action would have an impact.

Other problems will ALWAYS remain. That's no reason not to make a dent in what can be dented.

I don't know if you've noticed, but politicians aren't in the business of root-cause analysis or actual solutions. They are in the business of making things either slightly better or significantly worse for certain people.

This would make the situation slightly better for people who want to buy houses.

Perhaps it's the case I'm 100% for this mainly because my extremely low expectations for politicians have been met and exceeded in this circumstance.

I don't know why we have to be negative about something that makes a small improvement in something that sucks.

I think my suggestion would unlock a lot of supply, without expanding our cities or adding to urban sprawl.

Keep in mind, about half of all adults are married, so each couple can own two properties. One to live in, one to rent.

I imagine we could figure out some way to handle inheritance, perhaps we could give somebody 12 months to decide which house the want to keep, and which to sell.

There are people who unironically seem to want to do that.

I figure many couples would live in one home, rent a second.

The children could have one each too, perhaps only once they reach 18.

I think there would be plenty of rental stock still.

Rental single-family homes should largely be illegal. Short-term housing should be largely limited to apartment buildings and more space-economic structures. Littering the landscape with empty houses only helps bank accounts.

Still, I'm more than cognizant that there must be huge exceptions carved out for any of these ideas.

the owner could rent out their own house and rent someone elses.

it does make sense if you want to save a nice retirement home for yourself or a place where you want to raise your children while you work and live somewhere else.

I think the idea is that nobody would prefer to rent if given a choice, and that everybody could afford to own if not for the presence of landlords in the market.