Comment by oceanplexian
2 days ago
> But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties.
Maybe they should clamp down on that as well, especially individuals who are only purchasing SFH in residential neighborhoods as a way to park their overseas cash.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Realistically if the biggest problem is couple’s divorcing to get a second home, then the problem has been pretty well attacked
Why do you people always need to use more jackboot? At some point the juice is not worth the squeeze.
If the rule changes fixes it in 9/10 cases and 1/10 games it then call it success and move on.