Comment by brightball
2 days ago
About 2 miles from my house, a housing development recently went up.
No homes for sale. Rent only.
Stuff like that is becoming a big problem.
2 days ago
About 2 miles from my house, a housing development recently went up.
No homes for sale. Rent only.
Stuff like that is becoming a big problem.
I don't think you can say that universally. Some people prefer to rent instead of own. Some people would like to own, but would probably still only be afford to rent even if home prices were more affordable.
Sure, you can absolutely make the argument that for some specific region there are too many rental properties and not enough owner-occupied properties, by looking at the supply, demand, and pricing for each type in that region.
But you absolutely can't say that as a general statement. There is demand for both sorts of housing.
Why? Why should I care what the balance of rental and owner-occupied is? Owned is not strictly better than rented!
At scale, it limits the supply of available homes to buy which increases the prices.
When we constantly read stories about people not being able to afford homes today, it’s all driven by pure supply and demand. When a firehose of money gets aimed at any aspect of the economy everything gets more expensive.
This is from institutional investors. Sometimes it’s government when we are talking about the price of education or healthcare for example.
None of this is happening "at scale", but either way, you're talking about the price of deeds on houses, and affordable housing isn't about home ownership; in fact, the urge people have to drive this issue towards "starter homes" is a big part of the problem, because the highest-opportunity areas have strictly limited carrying capacity for single-family homes in the first place, and what we desperately need to do is upzone and diversify the housing stock.
It’s literally a new development. Someone went out and turned some raw land into rental houses. If they had left it as raw land, there also would have been no change in supply of houses to buy.
Instead, now they’ve created a slight reduction in demand for houses to buy by offering a housing alternative that didn’t exist before.
> it limits the supply of available homes to buy
It also lowers the demand (it increases the supply of an alternative).
Isn’t manipulation of zoning an example of why it’s important and how even with a small share they can have an outsized influence on the market? Also I seriously doubt the return to work directives are driven by anything more then the projected drop in property values.
No. I actually don't give a shit whether corporations can buy single-family houses, by which I mean, I don't care if that's banned. My problem is that high-opportunity high-value residential areas are deeply resistant to upzoning and are actively using this "corporate investor" narrative as a reason why they should wait. Corporate investors are not why the inner ring suburbs with the good schools in major metros are expensive; zoning is. This is literally a distraction from affordability work.
4 replies →
And neither is rented strictly better than owned. You would care if you wanted to own but couldn't.
I agree, in the same way I'd care the other direction if I wanted to rent, which is why I don't understand the concern about inventory shifting to rentals.
15 replies →
My wife and I prefer to rent. Greater flexibility. This is not a big problem any more than the fact that Costco replaced stock of Spiceology rubs with Bang Bang Sichuan seasoning.
Example of large buyer in thin market - just as up-thread described.
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