There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties.
Here's an article on the topic from 2023[0], a bit old but my understanding is large institutional investment in residential real estate was already starting to cool down.
Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.
I suspect this statement, and even if it becomes an actual ban, is largely to gain wider popular support around a largely imaginary concern people have.
0. https://www.housingwire.com/articles/no-wall-street-investor...
The things that they do have massively outsized downstream impact contrasted against their relatively tiny overall participation in the market, and they can afford to behave in ways that manipulate the behavior of the majority.
If you can decouple them from the housing markets, you also decouple the interests of the donor class, and you allow for policy that doesn't maximize the cost of real estate over the interests of the majority of the population.
If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the entire cost of the property to a bank in the form of interest payments.
Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow...
|“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
I'm pretty naive to the issue, but awhile back I took a look at property records for my neighborhood. In fact, equity firms, including BlackRock, were buying up a bunch of houses in my neighborhood.
A tiny datapoint, I know.
Edit: It might've been Blackstone. It's been about a year since I looked it up.
Edit 2: Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?
The last call I took, last year, they were ready to buy my house in cash at market value without looking at the property.
The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are rentals, and there are thousands of houses in my neighborhood under the same HOA.
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.
This is a common trope.
"It's not big conglomerates that buy and hodl the homes where families are supposed to live, its mom and pop investors so please be nice."
Having a home is not something to speculate with or leave it to the supposed "market forces".
Housing projects and regulation is what this country needs, yesterday.
"The Arrived team is cracked, and I love the audacity of their vision: a stock market for real estate," said Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, in a release. "I'm betting on them to democratize and digitize access to America's $50 trillion in residential real estate." [0]
Should housing be a “$50 trillion” market for fractional ownership, bundled with its own secondary/speculative market to turn around and flip like penny stocks?
Lovely knowing I can have “access” to that platform and own a 0.004% share in a house someone somewhere out there lives in (rents). While I’ll probably never own a house again.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/13/arrived-launches-trading...
I think the relevant quantity we'd want to look at is what constitutes most of the property being bought-up by investors. Counting investors is going to bias the count towards multitudes of little-guys.
The reason institutional investors are blamed is that they usually have significant holdings elsewhere, and demonstrably will just wait out a market, taking loses they write off against their other businesses in the meantime, rather than actually participating in it. That ability to wait out the market on a finite resource rather than participating is usually otherwise only seen during antitrust market activities. The fact that many cities are considering adding significant vacancy taxes on properties, citing specifically this behavior as a driving factor, is pretty damning.
Additionally, it's not necessary for these institutional investors that are ignoring the market pressures to own a majority, or even that large of a share. Any portion they own and ignore the market for is effectively just removed from the market entirely and reduces the remaining pool of what's available. And the second-order effect is an overall damping of market responsiveness since they are simply refusing to respond to the demand half of supply and demand. I don't have the models to run the math myself, but it should theoretically be possible to calculate how much their involvement without participation impacts the prices as a relation to market share, and I'll bet it's a nonlinear result with a steep curve at even low volumes.
Corporate entity creation in America is such that I don’t think this will be enforceable (“we don’t buy homes, our Gibraltar office’s subsidiary invested in its CEO’s LLC that bought the home”) but if I’m wrong, it could help somewhat.
It’s binary thinking to assume that just because it isn’t a one step solution it won’t make a meaningful impact. But still, I think it won’t yet hope I’m wrong.
Like this one:
> In fact, institutional homebuyers (those who bought 100+ homes in a 12-month period) didn’t even reach 2.5% market share at the peak level in this data line, which goes back to the start of the century.
I don’t know how to evaluate this. I doubt this analysis rolls up subsidiaries. So what does it really mean for an entity to own 100+ units? Is that actually something we care about?
Imo only thing people need to give a shit about is whether a house is being bought to be lived in.
Obviously, the other factor in home prices is zoning and people who own wanting to keep supply down so their house is guaranteed to appreciate. Affordable housing (just like homelessness) in the US is only a problem because we lack the political will to solve it.
> "Large institutional investors, defined as those owning over 100 homes (which includes private equity firms), own 3 percent of the single-family rental stock nationwide according to Brookings. This share is higher in some local markets — in the 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas where these investors are most present, they own 12.4 percent"
I personally believe that its problematic that large institutional investors own 12.4% of single family properties in the 20 main metro areas of the US.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "Wall Street" buying up all the property and real estate investment firms like RREAF doing the same, or come to that the guy down the street buying a few properties to rent out.
A small company or single investor can buy up a large percentage of local available property and be just as bad a landlord.
If Black Rock is guilty of anything here above all else, it's taking advantage of a situation deliberately created for someone else. If government policy wasn't already going balls to the wall trying to constantly pump up property values, there'd be no investment returns to be had.
Give me the levers of federal, state, and local government and I promise you I can completely tank property values in 48 hours or less.
You are correct however that smaller private investors are more common. I live in a small city. Small property management companies from NYC and NJ are pretty commonly buying up 2-4 family houses. I suspect that some of these "small" players aren't small at all, but hiding in a maze of LLCs.
I know a couple of dudes from way back that have leveraged their way to a real estate empire with >2000 homes in the region.
You seem to want it both ways. It was a misconception, but it apparently did happen, and apparently "cooled down?" I don't think all these things can be true.
It's highly possible they were heavily investing and were planning on continuing but people noticing and the social pushback it created caused them to change their minds about the strategy.
> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.
People may or may not be. They may or may not be my neighbors. You seem to be pushing a set of ideals rather than a set of facts.
Atlanta specifically when I was flipping houses in 2012-2015 had a lot of corporate investors buying up low income properties, fixing them up, then renting them out.
But make no mistake, during the housing boom post 2019, in a lot of 'hot' metro areas, "wall street" was buying way more homes than individuals. Especially in the south. In the area I lived in, Invitation Homes, some weird shell company of Blackstone, was buying up every piece of tract housing they could get their hands on. At one point, they were making agreements with builders building out new neighborhoods to not sell to individuals since they wanted them all.
So no, I care far less about what my neighbor is doing because he or she isn't attempting to price out an entire city.
To a degree, but there's a whole tranche of investment vehicles that accredited investors use to invest in single-family homes that is not securitized at all, and not on Wall Street. The whole fix-and-flip industry feeds into this now, loaning out money to turn houses into rentals that some LLC holds.
https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/200899449445747946...
It matters, you just dont want to know it matters.
"US will ban Wall Street investors" != "Trump says he will ban Wall Street investments..."
This a Truth Social post from the President. It doesn't mean it has happened, will happen or will happen in the form that either Trump says it will or is being implied here.
This is a very difficult issue to properly address for lots of legal/logistical reasons. For example - many legitimate homeowners have their homes registered as LLCs and most home legislation is governed by states.
With house prices being driven up by reckless lending through a debased currency, you enter a feedback loop where every inflating currencies drive prices higher, which only fuels a further frenzy of lending (including through FOMO) to driver prices higher once again.
Building has not kept pace with growth in households.
This feels very similar to the Canadian narrative that foreign (read: Chinese) investors are buying all the houses in Vancouver & Toronto. Does it happen? absolutely, but it's also a nice way to blame a segment that has no voice or recourse. It also allows us to turn a blind eye to the impact of a generation of essentially zero % interest rates and a country that holds twice as much of their wealth in houses as the US. Other popular targets: out-of-province home owners, vacation property owners, multi-generational properties.
What it will come down to is the exact wording of what Trump means by "large institutional investors" (his exact words on Truth).
> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.
So in '08 we saw the veil drop on the mortgage folks. For a brief moment the sort of advantage they were taking of individual homeowners (I'm including landlords here) was plain for all to see, because the systems they had built to extract that value had been pushed too far and started to break.
The really clever/evil/nasty thing that happened next was that they all said "we're sowwy" and pretended to close up shop on the Mortgage Backed Securities markets, while sowing the seeds for a resurgence in mortgage lending by having Fannie run REO-to-Rental programs that sold foreclosed homes in bulk to investors. It would have been too obvious in the numbers if large institutional investors had bought those directly, so they let mom and pop go into business as landlords, effectively buying obfuscation of the stream of finances for the cost of whatever margins they had to take a hit on to allow for low interest rates to pump housing prices up to a place where, like in 07, they could go back to fucking around with mortages.
In less word salady terms, the plan looked like so:
- "oh fuck we pushed it too far and here come the torches and pitchforks"
- Stop making money on mortgages, but we're investment banks as well as mortgage lenders, so we can make up for the loss of mortgage money by buying a more significant fraction of the housing market at near-zero interest rates
- Wait for low interest rates to pump housing prices over time
- Okay cool, people have forgotten about the whole 08 thing and we've peeled back all the subsequent regulation so we can go back to making our money bundling risky ass mortgage securities again <--- we are here>
The essence of the problem as I see it is that finance has gotten so byzantine and complicated that the only people who understand it in real time are the people who are actively trying to manipulate it to maximize their profits, and by the time it becomes clear what dirty tricks they're pulling they've moved on to the next grift so it looks like they're innocent.
Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.
The people responsible for the cost crunch middle class people feel isn’t billionaires. Bezos isn’t using his money to buy up houses or daycare spots in your neighborhood or Disney Word tickets. It’s upper quantile white collar workers. They are competing with the middle class for the same goods and services, but make much more money relatively than they did in past decades.
I'm sick of the arguments that rely on the meaning of "most/many/some/not all". The arguments are irrefutable because you can always weasel your way through the meaning of the quantifier, or the false implication that only the "biggest" of something needs redress before the next in line.
A person owning a second home is fine, that's one of the paths towards financial independence: small business ownership. Someone starting out in a tiny money making operation is a good thing, and they do not need to compete with a trillion dollar empire!
And it may win votes for Republicans in swing districts, since the "BlackRock bought all the houses!" line is heard much more often from the Left, meaning this is something you can show an on-the-fence voter to signal how you are against those evil Wall Street guys.
I wonder if he'll be able to resist slipping in some kind of small-time grift for a family member or campaign donor, though.
Now I know.
People should go find something else to invest their savings in.
Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities.
If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.
I'm hopeful that successive governments over here show the courage of their convictions and enact enough change that my kids have a chance of getting into their own places, same as I did.
Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses? It's all very well saying "That's what the market wants" when that's also all the market supplies. How do we bootstrap the idea of smaller, denser, affordable, more-diverse housing options?
In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments.
The "American Dream" is a single-family-home, surrounded by other single-family homes, but even with urban sprawl we simply run into the limits of a commute and prices skyrocket.
Ironically we actually solved this problem: Indefinite Telecommuting. But then decided to take our solution that reduces property prices, reduces air pollution, and improves quality of life and then just threw it away because commercial property owners were losing money.
My reasoning is we have a massive construction sector compared to other nations, with a relatively high productivity in terms of dwellings built per capita. We also have pretty slack standards, with even weaker enforcement.
In addition to that, we have a very weak growth in productivity per capita; and since we are trying to rapidly grow, we have to play catch up to provide the same level of services. This needs to happen while our construction sector is stressed, so the same amount of wealth goes a shorter distance again.
You can also see this in rental prices; negative gearing should allow the capital price to decouple from the rental yield to a larger extent than without it; but we still see high rents...
It will make very little difference if Wall Street investors hold very little property.
Putting a finger on the scale of how much real estate is individually owned definitely makes a difference though. It makes it worse.
100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties.
>If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.
Yes. However supply is artificially restricted by government, to the approval of the average property owning voter. So more specifically, that is what needs to be changed. Everything else is window-dressing.
This is a country sliding further towards being us, with their housing being more restricted and more expensive.
China did "over" solve it by building loads of houses, so everyone's house value just crippled down like crazy.
If buying a house delivers 5–10× the ROI of the S&P 500, that’s not “smart investing” then there is a huge problem to be addressed ... (preferably by building more)
THIS. If Supply & Demand just feels too complex, then spend a day watching kids play musical chairs.
There's a counterpart to supply in supply-demand. I wonder if we could also adjust that.
You can also look at reducing demand due to mass migration.
In that light, this move is A-OK with me.
I feel like there will be a difference between a handful of large corporations owning a majority of properties vs thousands of dentists and software engineers. Are you saying that all of these property owners are also soulless profit-optimizers?
I remember watching some video of tenants being priced out of their rental apartments so when they tried to contact the property owner, they found layers upon layers of managers and companies. It just seems better when there are more thousands of owners than just a handful of corporations.
The inevitable outcome of this is increasing homelessness, and likely slums when homeless just start building themselves make shift shelter in such large numbers that authorities can't stamp down on it.
I have a hard time believing lots of people care to do that - not many take steps for privacy - or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.
There are generous protections in most states for your personal home that you lose if it's owned by an LLC. This includes things like a homestead exemption in bankruptcy protection.
In Florida, for example, there are better options to keep yourself anonymous. Florida has something called a land trust [1].
[1]: https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2024/04/understanding-the-...
Trusts are in the same boat. If you're using the LLC as a pass-through, these restrictions won't apply to you unless an orange cat is charged with drafting.
No thanks.
And at the new home I moved into, the house next door is owned by foreign interests and rented out to the highest bidder. It makes it extremely difficult to get anything done that involves shared areas (like common fence or overhanging trees) because the owner is essentially unavailable and doesn't speak english. Not to mention that every year or so we have to deal with renters who are minimally vetted. We've had a group of 5 college kids turn the place into a frat house once. There is also a property management company involved, but they can't get in contact with the owner either.
In my experience, this seems to be a bigger issue than wall street investors.
Maybe they are next?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up...
As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entrants, we will be stuck with this problem.
If your rentoid decides to rip the copper wiring out, or not pay their rent for a year, then you’ve wiped out 10 years of profit.
This is a government policy failure. Because no one is allowed to build fast enough, there is always a demand for luxury (higher profit) and thus that is what gets built.
In fact, quite possibly it could do the opposite because we’re softening the demand signal.
- Whether this is needed or helps depends not on percentage of owners or buyer/sellers, but on the effect in the market of such players. REIT's have an outsize effect because they are repeat players, and thus lucrative clients for brokers, who qualify themselves by skewing local markets accordingly.
- Policy-wise, it's hard to distinguish by size: second homes, mom-and-pop with a few rentals, REIT, private equity. (This is how corporations get free-speech rights.)
- Politically, it's a shame that a real problem is addressed via scapegoating
- Practically, it will have little effect since REIT's and home builders are sitting on a lot of inventory that they can't sell, so they've stopped accumulating (and they're resorting to secondary offerings to pay off the original investors). Indeed, to the extent this stimulates buying, they're all for it.
- Ethically, the US has been a magnet for money laundering, much of it via real estate, which has pushed up asset prices and de-conditioned professionals. Scapegoating only delays reform.
If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world.
Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.
Builders are more concentrated than landlords in pretty much any geography. A concentration that scales with the amount of bureaucracy and bullshit required to get permits.
We know using housing as an investment, at an individual level, is problematic (NIMBYism and failure to infill/redevelop/etc). Not sure how incentivizing MegaCorp to do the same on a massive scale fixes anything?
The key is increasing supply, and we should directly target that issue (or decrease demand, but people don't like that side).
If you believe that banning investors from buying SFHs will decrease the price of SFHs, why not also ban investors from buying apartments/condos?
The valuation of the property goes up and down directly with the interest rate.
The ROI of the house (we bought in 2016) was ~8% on the down payment over the past 10 years, excluding maintenance and interest charges. As an investment, property is not a very good one.
To get that 8% on the down payment, I spent 4% on the remainder. It really doesn't net positive after the mortgage interest (with a 20% down payment). It's about "forced savings" and having control over your environment.
As an aside, since people are stuck in houses (mortgage rates and prop-13), there is a definite lack of starter homes. Everyone adds the second bathroom, meaning there aren't any single bathroom homes to be found. That increases the market floor.
We’ll try everything except for a land value tax, so that we can eventually prove once and for all that LVT is the right thing to do! :)
But actually, it’s good to see movement on the underlying problem (affordability of home ownership). This is The Domestic American Problem of our times, and it deserves to be closer to the center of the Overton window of our politics and policy-making.
Even if we think this step is kind of meaningless, it draws more attention to the problem, which is a good thing.
Denmark has an LVT and copenhagen affordability is... not good.
They don't want to admit that their abhorrent policies are hitting the pocket books of their supporters, so they latch onto popular sentiment instead of solving the problem. Typical of this administration.
I built a house in 2018 for $350k. To build the same house again today would be $650k (and it would probably take twice as long). Surprisingly, the cost of land is not much more than it was 8 years ago. All of that cost increase is in materials and labor.
The problem is, the market value of my house is $550k, at the most. Meaning it's not profitable to build new houses as the market can't sustain them. And who is going to sell their house at less than they can get another one for? Only people who are forced to move, which is probably why the there is such low inventory in the historically cheaper markets.
Rammed earth is a very decent building material but if you make the walls thick and compress it hard enough (maybe add steam?) it will last hundreds of years. Other building methods should be considered ofc domed roofs are perhaps not cool enough.
Disassemble the machine, ship the containers and deploy it some place else.
Add some killer features to the homes so that people cant wait to live there. For the first 400 miles at least $30 billion comes out (over 30 years) or $15 bl per year for each year of construction. Should be good enough for investors.
If it works, build additional improved versions. Aim for a factory that makes these machines.
Something like a sane version of the line.
Something like this only 20 times larger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKi8VWRDA_c
Something like this but moving.
You can increase supply but investors would just snatch them up. Maybe the feds could put a cap on the value of a single-family home that an institution can own and then make ownership very tedious. For example, no institution can own a home valued at more than $500k and for each home owned a quarterly filing must be made in person at the county the home is located. I'm sure these organizations would rather own very high value homes than lots of low value ones out in BFE.
It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern. Although if you're in medicine there is probably hope.
If only technology had progressed to an extent that we don't psychically need to be concentrated in 15-20 HCOL major metro areas to do most (if not all) office jobs.
On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.
Corpo landleeches nickle and dime you (base rent + rent payment fee + pest control fee + trash fee + valet trash fee + fee for the service that bills water/sewage + mail room fee + others I'm no doubt forgetting) (but they only advertise the base rent), and they like to push straight up scams ( such as forcing mandatory renters insurance at 3x the market rate, expensive "benefits" packages with everything from HVAC filter delivery to credit monitoring, all heavily marked up.). The individual land lord? just a flat rent every month, no surprises.
I'm sure there are plenty of horror stories about individual landlords though; the same greed drives both to cut corners and maximize profits.
Did you read the article? The impetus was a tweet where he called on congress to write and pass a law to this effect.
- 20% maximum corporate tax
- Personal Salt cap
Made it less expensive for an llc to buy a home than for most individuals.
To make individual ownership on par with corporate, individuals need to be in a lower tax bracket, be able to deduct taxes , interest, and insurance. And the $10k cap really hurt the ability for local property taxes to make it better for the individual. The new $40k cap may put it slightly towards the individual in some jurisdictions.
But raising corporate rates or reducing corporate deductible expense re real estate is the most efficient policy to encourage individual ownership.
Housing continues to be the biggest problem in modern world and yet it is a problem not resolved.
But by how much? ~3-4% of housing has to be sold, some amount of it will still be bought for renting (as many people still want to rent). Surely this can’t have a very big effect on house price
Many families have the majority of their wealth tied up in their home, and another significant portion of it (knowingly or not) in the SFH MBS market via their retirement investments. If prices fall quickly enough to impact the MBS market, a large number of households could suddenly see big dips their two biggest sources of wealth.
A gradual drop may be fine, but the financialization of housing at the national is a big mess. Sadly it makes the market dynamics of giving people places to live way more complex than it should be.
I recently worked on an MVP for a Zillow-for-wholesale startup. As a curveball, our state passed a law restricting where and how these contract-to-buy sellers operate. So their workaround, after consulting lots of lawyers, was to provide a standardized LLC / Contract flow such that you’re no longer marketing a house for sale. You’re marketing a stake in an LLC, only that LLC has a sole purpose (a contract to option out a specific house).
Of course that’s unpopular to those who want to freely commit to bad practices.
People don’t have a natural feel for how little you need to alter flow to cause liquidity in a system to collapse.
This will be good for existing homeowners because it will increase home prices and increase rents.
It's bad for renters.
Small investor ownership in single-family homes (for both short- and long-term rentals) have been devastating to communities. What is the right number of single-family homes to permit individuals/trusts to own and how do you disincentivize small empires?
Wall Street investor monopoly ownership of dense housing in urban areas remains a major cause of rents outstripping income (see Blackrock's 2020-2025 market takeover and subsequent market manipulation of apartment rental rates in San Diego). Simple policy solution: trust-bust apartment ownership. Harder, more effective policy solution: municipality ownership of apartment blocks a la European cities.
If regulators allow the same behaviors with water, you can expect a similar set of harms.
(And no, this is not a Trump thing. This has been the case for a while now.)
Which option is being proposed vastly changes the merits and problems of this policy, so it's a poor choice that this isn't made abundantly clear.
Not that because "we have a right to housing" or other catchphrases, but because getting rid of the government sponsored local monopolies is impossible.
But at least people eating the chaff of property owners will celebrate it, I guess.
Given this, it’s inevitable - the New American Dream will be communal living.
As a renter, I was drawn to this as a way to get some exposure to real estate, and I ended up investing in a vacation rental. At the same time, I'm pretty conflicted about it. Profiting from vacation housing feels different to me than profiting from people’s primary shelter, which is a basic necessity.
More broadly, I think as long as the incentives of property owners and renters are fundamentally misaligned, it will remain extremely difficult for middle-class folks who don't already own property to break into the market. The system optimizes for extracting rent, not for creating new owners.
If you believe that nobody should profit from providing housing, what do you propose as the incentives for people to build, capitalize, and maintain said housing?
Two areas I'm particularly curious about are a) the financing of new construction, and b) the sale prices of SFHs.
Outside of a few metro areas where institutional ownership is very high, I don't think this would change anything. As long as houses remain an attractive investment, non-institutional smaller investors will happily buy the properties for a few thousand dollars less than the institutions would.
Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.
Concrete, gypsum and steel are primarily domestically produced. Similar goes for wood (although a substantial amount is imported, e.g. from Canada - the tariffs range from 25% to 50%). Labour & Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50% of this is likely materials, with likely a minority of the materials tariffed.
What is likely to actually reduce rent and house prices is making development permission and laws more lax, as well as preventing rent control.
And just in general reducing the restrictions on building in places with high rent to income ratios.
Oh I thought the one extremely obvious way was to fix local policy roadblocks. After all, it's not like a lacking supply of housing is a new issue they suddenly appeared out of nowhere within the last dozen months.
It’s more complex than just reducing tariffs and inviting cheap labor. It’s systemic red tape put in by the large builders to prevent anyone but them to be able to build. When they do build, it’s never to code. The code they themselves help write. Ryan Homes for example…
>because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing:
Cheaper housing doesn't mean that institutions won't still try to buy it up.
It also seems like it might be important to determine what share of _new_ development is being created for investment. The share of existing homes being owned isn't as important.
There's also the 2nd order effect. The price of property might go down if there weren't investors with tons of money to spend on a property.
That's quite an extreme political take.
A more humble basic economic theory question would be:
If you ban large institutional investors from buying homes, and then you ban small institutional investors from buying homes. And only owners directly can buy homes, no renting. Would that be good? Sure homes would be cheap, but very shortly after that the supply of new housing would drop dramatically, as there's no one to finance building homes, maybe the ultra rich will just invest in their own mansions or yachts?
Just very basic economics is the discussion here, not tariffs and china politics, but just a variant of the highschool/red-scare question of, "will anti-wealth laws have a positive effect on the economy"? in the past it was determined that no, and that you were a communist for suggesting it, but maybe there's a nuanced take like making a difference between some type of "institutional" investors and other types of investors?
I know we all hate on the electoral college, but it exists and it isn't going away anytime soon.
I'm not saying the answer is to force folks to move to "flyover country", but that's what you'd do if you wanted to avoid another presidential victory by a trump-like character.
Trump says a ton of things that he never ends up doing.
This is an easy thing for Trump to promise (after all, little family-owned real-estate developer operations like his would never be affected). But who owns the homes is not going to change the problem that Americans have underdeveloped housing supply by over a million homes.
Can’t buy a single home but an entire community is okay.
absolutely, easily predictable
what should be a one page bill will have riders of insanity
they'll probably do it like they do with corporations having more than 15 employees, so every little business just has 15 people contracting out to the next business with 15 people etc., there will be a corporation for every 15 houses etc.
Trump, notoriously, says all sorts of things.
I'm sure this'll come right after he finishes his healthcare plans in "two weeks".
Edit: I think this was the post https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1158550595275...
I guess they didn't link it because it changes the meaning of the article, his post reads more like he's going to discuss it and wants to do something about it.
Quote from the article: "In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban which he would also call on Congress to codify in law."
The president can't do this. His EO will likely be some kind of statement of intent or request to the FTC to see what can be done. Really, this is an exhortation for Congress to do something. A bill has yet to be written.
It needs to be illegal for anyone to buy a single-family home that already owns one, and who won't agree to live in it, full-time and exclusively for at least one year. They must also agree to sell it ONLY to someone who also accepts the same terms. The penalty should be a criminal fraud charge with minimum jailtime -and- a hefty penalty.
Why? Housing prices will rise, rents will rise.
Anyhow, I argue that investors are positive for the the house market. They shouldn't be banned. Investors provide enough liquidity to the market so that the building companies have enough certainty to invest in large housing projects, because they know that their properties will be sold quickly. If investors would be banned they would sell their houses eventually as well but it would take much longer.
Similarly, investors improve mobility and throughput. An individual putting his house for sale will find a buyer much faster when investors are in the buying market, who are willing to buy up a house when nobody else takes it and sell it for a better price later. So: sellers sell faster, so they can move out and buy a new home faster as well: mobility in the house market increases.
In IT terms: investors function as a buffer.
not that I expect it to even happen at all
So my big worry is that the Trump admin will say they are going to only eliminate the most obvious cases and the problem will remain. The LLCs and shell corps, etc.
EDIT: Also it does not address the massive amount of housing stock that is foreign owned by people that don't even live in the country.
And which of his buddies does this benefit?
I'm trying to think if there will be ramifications to this...
- Obviously forced divestment of all Wall St owned single family homes could impact housing prices which is both the point, but of course... also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth
- I guess that crash could potentially have people paying lots of money for homes that aren't worth that much anymore, which sounds pretty negative
- Of course... wow, would it be nice to be able to afford something in the city I love (which I doubt will be impacted by this)
Of course, no clear plan here. Just Trump saying something, why wasn't the "Trump says" part kept in the headline here?
I know how that paragraph reads, but the past couple of years have made me too cynical to trust anything they say they're going to do.
(Of course, they were not buying it all.)
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. president was due to sign unspecified executive orders later on Wednesday.
Anyways, I thought that issues with Americans being able to afford things like housing was all a hoax made up by Democrats?
Why craft policies to address a made up issue?
No actual implementation steps have been taken or explained. Will this happen before or after the health care plans are released? Before or after the still pending infrastructure bill?
“ Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban, which he would also call on Congress to codify in law. *It was not clear what steps he would take*”
But short-term it'll hurt availability. One of the most common ways to enshittify cities is buying an SFH, demolishing it, and plopping a 3-4 apartment complex in its place.
No one wants to abolish this welfare program (you would have an easier time abolishing Social Security), but also the government wants to keep the trappings of a market price system. It is easier to have serial crises and to blame some guys for the predictable explosions every time, adjust the laws to create enormous numbers of lawyer billable hours nationwide, and then set the stage for the next crisis and the next round of patsies to be blamed. Fortunately, this time we have AI to write all the think pieces about what it really means.
The end game for capitalism is for everyone to rent everything: healthcare, cars, software, music, physical items, roads, etc.
Correct title is: "Trump says he will ban Wall Street investments in single-family homes"
Very surprisingly progressive opinions from Trump.
I do completely agree though, the consumer surplus of housing should be captured by people. Not investors looking to profit.
It's extremely toxic to society when investors get to eat the utility of housing.
Do it. Do it now.
1. Politically, this issue is a winner and it's crazy that the Democratic Party has refused to bang the drum on this, basically because it potentially upsets corporate donors. They have instead ceded this poopulist political ground to the Republican Party. The Democratic Party does not want to win elections and this should never have been more obvious than the 2024 presidential election;
2. Hoarding housing is state-sanctioned violence. You need housing to live. Housing affordability is the number one factor in homelessness [1]. That then subjects people to violence and danger that we, as a society, are allowing to happen. There is no reason that the wealthiest country on Earth can't provide a roof over the head of every man, woman and child within our borders;
3. The private sector will never solve the housing crisis because solving the housing crisis involves devaluing, definancializing and decommodifying housing. Wealthy people and large corporations who own a lot of real estate won't on their devalue their holdings. Things like Ezra Klein's Abundance claptrap are simply putting a Democratic bow on Reagan era trickle down economics and deregulation. This requires state action. That means the state needs to build significant amounts of housing to provide to people to regulate the housing market. The poster child for this policy is Vienna, Austria;
4. Voters have fooled themselves into thinking that increasing house prices are good for them. They're not. They're bad in virtually every way. There are people who bought a house for $100k in 1990 where that house is now worth $2M. Are you $1.9M richer? No. Because if you sell it what happens? You have to buy another house. And if every other equivalent house costs $2M you still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth;
5. Increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and suppressing wages. Why suppressing wages? Because if you're laden with debt, you'll be a complaint little worker bee. You need that paycheck to not be homeless. You are in effect a debt-slave, particularly combined with student and possibly medical debt; and
6. The next wave of antitrust action will involve the use of AI as a means for market collusion and manipulation. A great and relevant example is RealPage [2]. If all the landlords use the same software and that software is designed to algorithmically increase rents, then that's market collusion. Honestly, dynamic pricing in general needs to be banned.
[1]: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/0...
[2]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Like so many other big promises, it will appease a lot of people, but there will be no real follow through.
Any regulation that prevents unrestrained capitalism is immediately decried as socialism and therefore evil.
These kinds of promises are made which temporarily create market volatility, and once it later (usually quite soon) becomes clear that the big thing will not actually happen, the markets snap back. At this point, it’s incredibly likely that these situations are manufactured to both look good AND create large short term investment gains for people in the know - without actually changing anything.
If anyone thinks this is not a problem, why would they comment, it would be irrelevant as banning salmon from participating in taikwondo
Instead everyone says how it's so false and this is just silly. This tells me - they are liars and it isn't silly at all
