4 ms·
As a millennial who aspires to home ownership in the next year or two, thanks to the suffocating rental market: this article gives me hope. I'm not interested i
by vanilla_nut 4y ago
As a millennial who aspires to home ownership in the next year or two, thanks to the suffocating rental market: this article gives me hope. I'm not interested in paying obscene amounts of money for currently overvalued housing just to line the pockets of boomers trying to cash in on... owning a house at the right time.
A crash would finally get me to jump into the market. I suspect there are a lot of other millennials like myself who feel priced out of housing in general, so I think this is a necessary crash if we want my generation to avoid renting for our entire lives.
On the subject of rent, some interesting tidbits in this article about price-fixing in the rental market over the past few years. Maybe we'll see the federal government clamp down on that nonsense finally.
One especially interesting quote from the article:
> Tarrant County, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, saw 52% of all home sales go to investors in 2021!
For anyone renting or considering buying in a US city over the last 2-3 years, this won't come as much of a surprise. But it's crazy to think that this is just institutional investors taking up half the market. It doesn't even account for short term rentals, second homes, etc., which definitely distort market demand as well.
I really wish the USA would come down hard on these investors, especially when homelessness is on an obvious rise. But let's be honest, when the market crashes they'll just get a ton of tax write-offs and beg for government assistance on top of that. I hope we don't fall for it this time.
- ianai 4y agoI’m in that highly-unlucky older millennial to almost gen-X cohort that got royally screwed by the Great Recession. So yeah really wish policies would favor us little people for once.
- LUmBULtERA 4y agoA pessimistic view is that if housing prices do crash, even more of the houses will get snapped up by institutional investors. Unfortunately, this seems likely to me.
- cercatrova 4y agoMillennials just have to snap them up before investors do. And will investors have enough money and appetite for risk in a heavily crashed market? My intuition is that they'd be too spooked and would want to preserve capital rather than deploying it.
- light_hue_1 4y agoExcept that institutional investors can be counter-cyclical. They know that the capital will be there and that housing prices will go back up. So they can buy houses when the economy is bad and Millennials can't. We should bad institutional investors from owning homes.
- dont__panic 4y agoWhat we really need is a huge tax writeoff for primary homes. Own a second home? Owe massive taxes on it. Company owns thousands of homes? Massive taxes on every single one of them. There's a massive homelessness problem in the USA right now. Lots of people are struggling to buy their first homes. I suspect it would take a long time (and involve lots of loopholes) to completely ban investor-owned properties... but I would support that as well.
- CuriouslyC 4y agoHousing demand isn't going anywhere, and a faltering housing market means less new house construction which will keep rent high. Investors can make all cash offers, get houses for cheap and rent them out, and if they control enough of the rental market they can push heavily inflated prices to juice their profit margin. What else are they going to do with their money? Securities and bonds are trash. Mortgages are brutal right now and going to get worse, so Millenials who can't make all cash offers are still going to be fucked.
- rdtwo 4y agoTreasury bonds pay 4.5% right now, so you would at least need to make 6% on your housing investment. There aren’t a lot of properties that you can buy that would yield 6% (of purchase price) rent a year.