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Comment by tjwebbnorfolk

2 days ago

From the moment I saw this in the WSJ this morning, I was wondering what people were going to come up with in order to be against this obviously-good idea, just because Trump said it.

Now I know.

10 comments

tjwebbnorfolk

Reply
thejazzman  2 days ago

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.

  • tjwebbnorfolk  2 days ago

    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.

Analemma_  2 days ago

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.

  • tjwebbnorfolk  2 days ago

    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.

    • Analemma_  2 days ago

      I have to admit, I'm very used to politicians tossing out non-fixes as a distraction when there's some problem, but your comment is the first case I've ever seen of a voter openly acknowledging that it's a non-fix, but being happy about it anyway. And not just that, but actually attacking the people pointing out that it's a non-fix, and casting sinister aspersions on their motives.

      This isn't even shooting the messenger or the guy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, I'm not sure there's an existing idiom for the thing you're doing.

      2 replies →

    • orangecat  2 days ago

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

      To the extent that it has the effect of transferring some properties from rentals to sales, it's only better for the renter who wants to buy and who just barely wasn't able to. It's worse for renters who either don't want to buy or who still can't afford it, because rents will increase due to reduced supply.

    • rick_dalton  2 days ago

      How are you so sure this will be a definite improvement? Many well-meaning policies have had a measurable negative effect.