About Realtors, remember that they don’t represent the buyer or seller, they represent the deal. They just want it to close and get paid. Obviously some are going to behave in ways that cost them money, but mostly not and it may be good advice to not use the most successful Realtors. (I was an Appraiser and a Real Estate Broker)
It’s just been posted there, so I swapped it out… 
bad guy make unstuckers mad guy
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Correction on this. The graph is of charges brought against the accused. Not what was actually siezed. As such prosecuter opinion and laziness comes into play
I’ve reached the point where there are fewer grammy winners I’ve heard of than ones I haven’t heard of.
I literally only know who Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are, never heard of any of those other six people. Unless Tanya Tucker is the same Tanya Tucker from like 30 years ago? Huh, googling and she is. OK three then.
Same - should have given it to Tanya Tucker dammit.
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Pro move is to use the seller’s realtor. It’s kind of a dick move but you can get away with murder and the realtor basically becomes a bigger advocate for you than if you had your own because they want double commission. Then you grind down the realtor and make him take reduced commission since he’s getting a double helping.
I remember when the Grammys seemed like fun. Then MTV Music Awards changed the game.
Is there a way to track how many residential properties are owned by foreign interests? If individuals or corps outside the country are buying property and sitting on it waiting for their “investments” to mature that could limit supply I would think.
It’s a major economic crisis already. It’s just underappreciated because the two facets of it play out in vastly different parts of the country. In desirable urban areas, it’s a rent crisis. In left-behind America, it’s a social crisis as whole generations of people are stuck in areas with no economic prospects because the areas that do have prospects are closed to new arrivals who can’t budget thousands a month for housing.
The mechanics of it are not paradoxical though–it’s just supply and demand 101. The market has to clear, which means the number of houses sold has to equal the number of houses bought. If lots of people want to buy houses, then the price must go up specifically so that most of the people who want to buy houses can’t afford them. If no one wanted the houses, then everyone would be able to afford them.
The slight complicating factor (and the one that creates the economic crisis) is that a house is not just a place to live in many cases–it’s also a work permit. Indeed, it would probably be an improvement on the current state of affairs if SFBA and NYC and similarly situated cities auctioned off a fixed number of work permits every year and you had to hold one to have a job paying more than $100k. At least that way the surplus is captured by the government rather than landowners, and it would protect low-income residents from having to compete with software engineers for slots in the city.
Until someone invents magical technology that allows an arbitrary number of housing units to be built on small plots of land, I don’t see a solution. And even then, you’d need some other magical technology that would allow all those people to move around the city without needing their own private vehicles.
Blaming foreigners is a classic move, but why wouldn’t these swarthy ne’er-do-wells lease the property while they’re waiting to sell it? It’s free money! A large majority of my professional work is representing RE investors, and I’ve never encountered an investor who just didn’t give a shit about NOI.
I think the line is supposed to be that the bad guys are Chinese billionaires or oil sheiks who have pied-a-terres in every major city. That one at least makes sense.
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Last time this discussion happened weren’t there many vacant units for every homeless person? How many vacant units of housing are necessary before prices go down?
There are plenty of American “real estate moguls” hoarding the supply. No need to blame foreigners.
Also, money laundering.
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I think it’s a tulip-capitalism-social status-irrational consumer problem.
It’s not at all surprising for there to be more vacant units than homeless people–wikipedia says that 0.17% of the population is homeless, so if every housing unit is vacant for 1 day in an average year, that’s going to be almost 2x as many vacant units as homeless people. In reality, I would guess a housing unit spends at least 2-3% of its useful life vacant.
You definitely need a lot of houses though. You can think of there being two dissimilar regimes for housing prices. In the normal regime, houses are like any other good, and their price is tied in a general sense to the cost of creating a new one (plus transaction costs, profit margins, etc.). In the other regime, housing prices are being conscripted to ration access to a metropolitan area. In that case, you’re buying a work permit + a house, and the work permits have a very inelastic supply. That means that the cost of the package depends largely on the value of the work permit. Effectively, you need to build enough houses for everyone who “seriously” (bit of a weasel word here) wants to work in the city is able to find a house. Then you’re back to the regime where the costs of building are driving the price.
…which is why the post you quoted was me asking if there was a way to track the data. I have no idea if it’s a real contributor to the housing-shortage problem without seeing the numbers. And sure, boogeyman Chinese and Arabs are often scapegoated in a “they took our jerbs” sort of way, but there are other countries too. Here in FL there’s a metric fuckton of RE owned by Canadians. I’ve seen no data on what they do with the properties when they’re not wintering in FL, though. I assume some do rent and a significant portion let it sit empty while they’re back home but I have no idea at what rates.
Since you seem to be attached to the industry, do you have any idea what factors contribute and by how much, and would you be willing to share? Or are you just here to shit on everyone else’s input?
People are willing to pay every cent they possibly can for a home. That’s why prices are so high. Not only willing to…they are eager to do it.