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

Presumably you can't just walk up to a bank and say "I'd like finance to buy 10 houses please!" with no collateral beyond the houses you're purchasing?

Here you usually need a 10% deposit. If you already own a house you can borrow against equity. The bank considers multiple houses as a single portfolio to calculate loan to value ratio (LVR), and will take tenants rents into account on affordability. A quick worked example based on local figures (average first home price $700k, average home price $1m):

New market entrant looking for a $700k house: Needs $70k in cash for deposit plus $28k stamp duty, takes $630k loan and now has a 90% LVR and 70k equity.

Existing homeowner with $1m house, bought at $300k some years ago and now has $100k left on their mortgage: Has $900k equity. Takes an interest-only loan against equity for the full $728k on the same 700k house. Total property worth $1.7m, 48% LVR qualifying for a lower interest rate and paying much less per month as they have taken the loan interest-only. Didn't have to save up a single cent to cover deposit or stamp duty. Still has $872k in equity on the two properties so does it again three more times. Buys a total of four investment properties, still comes in under 80% LVR.

If the market goes up another 25%, the new entrant is sitting on $245k equity.

The landlord's IPs are now worth 3.5 million on total debts of 3 million, at which point they can sell four houses, clear all their debts including their original mortgage and pocket $500k (and while capital gains tax is chargeable on sale of investment properties, it's heavily discounted compared to other assets). Or they can use this new equity to buy more houses.

> if you're taking the equity out of your $2M house, how are you servicing that debt?

Rent. There's also a rental crisis going on over here. Rents are really high and can pretty easily cover investor mortgages. There's lots of people who would have been able to buy few years back but can't scrape together the finance to do so now that prices have gone up, who are forced to keep renting. So the investor crush creates its own client base!

Plus if you do end up making a loss on mortgage payments, property upkeep etc, the government allows you to offset that against your all-sources income for tax purposes, potentially reducing that loss by 45% if you're a higher rate earner.

> My point is that it's an awful lot easier to buy 6 $100k houses than it is to buy 6 $2M houses, if houses weren't speculative assets, maybe we wouldn't get those buyers driving up prices.

It kinda isn't in Australia. The market rising makes it much easier to access more debt and leverage that into more houses.

But I very much agree that housing shouldn't be a speculative asset and this market is broken. The government should be putting in place disincentives, not discounts and offsets. Unfortunately established homeowners now see this as a normal way of 'getting ahead' and I know multiple people who are effectively playing monopoly like this.

I hate it. Even though in theory I could go out and buy four or five houses next week if I wanted to. But with the rising cost of living and general bleak economic outlook everyone is continually fed, and the seeming impossibility of 'winning' for the average person, I'm not surprised people do it.

(Yes I was very bored with work this morning....)

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.

It seems much more realistic to freeze growth than reverse it. Even then, growth in surrounding areas or other factors can quickly make the area more desirable and expensive as in SF.

Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?

The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population. Halting growth in one area just displaces it. This can be a good trade if the area into which growth is displaced is underdeveloped with few other potential uses. But it can also create Atlanta or Houston style sprawl, or destroy natural areas that would be better to preserve.

Japan is an unusual example because most job opportunities are in a handful of areas. You can get impossibly cheap properties in the countryside but there are few jobs or young people. Properties in the city keep getting more expensive because of demand and because building codes are constantly evolving to keep up with new developments in earthquake protection. There are older urban properties available for cheap outside of trendy areas, but the cost of renovation is often too high to be worth it. There’s also a cultural stigma around older properties.

I don't have all the information on Copenhagen yet. The stats from 1970-s are not available online, so I commissioned someone to get the data from the archives.

The available data basically shows that prices were stagnant during the 70-80-s and started rising in the 90-s.

> After all, building more housing in the city isn't mutually exclusive with building housing outside the city.

I think it is mutually exclusive, exactly because of the population growth (the lack thereof). Each dense apartment in a city core means one less house in a rural area somewhere.

Japan, that I gave as an example, has literally free houses that anyone can get for nothing but the government real estate transaction fees. Just 3-4 hours away from Tokyo.

During the pandemic, some research had shown that something like 70-80% of jobs can be remote.

The kicker is that remote work is less efficient. So in the long run and on average, companies with in-office jobs outperform fully remote companies. This is just like the situation with pollution: a company that spends money on waste recovery is less competitive than a company that can just dump toxic sludge into a nearby river.

And just like with pollution, centralized regulatory changes are needed so that all companies are affected similarly.

> The policies you suggest also seem difficult politically since most environmentalists seem to want more density, not less.

Yet they are misguided because they keep looking at the very tip of an iceberg. It's just one example out of many (see: nuclear power plants).

To give an example, light rail is more efficient than individual EVs. So it's great that Seattle is building light rail, right? It'll result in fewer "headline" CO2 emissions.

But then you realize that Seattle is going to spend $180B ("B", as in "billion") to build about 50 miles of tracks. It's more than the yearly GDP of 130 countries! All these resources could have been spent on something else, perhaps on building more renewable generation.

> But that's not true, is it?

It certainly is: look at the price of housing in New York City, then look at the price of housing in Newark, New Jersey. Many people want to live in the former, but must settle for the latter, due to lack of affordable NYC housing. Then look at the price of housing in Ainsworth, Nebraska: Even cheaper, because people want to live there even less.

Or look at your own example: People want to live in Tokyo more than they want to live 3-4 hours outside of Tokyo, hence the pricing for the latter is lower.

> Most people in the US want to live in suburban SFHs, yet they are often forced to live in apartments.

In my experience, most people in the US want lots of square footage within the city, and either settle for suburbia to get the square footage they want, or settle for less square footage to get the city living they want. This goes for both renters and buyers, and for both Single- and Multi-Family Housing.

How, then, would increasing the price of in-city housing (by reducing the supply, by replacing denser housing with less-dense housing) allow people to realize their big-city-big-living desires?

Alternatively, how would building housing hours and hours and hours outside the city (where pricing illustrates people don't want to live) allow people to realize their big-city-big-living desires?

Do they? Or do they just rationalize having to live in NYC?

Depending on the question, most people HATE living in cities: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1l1ryyq/ci... - and it's not even a close competition.

> socialization and meetups and camaraderie around every conceivable interest, innumerable dining options within a matter of blocks, some of the best live entertainment options in the world, friends within walking distance, etc. Case in point

Well, sure. Everything has trade-offs and people decide which ones are more acceptable for them. When given a choice, I moved out of dense areas. Because I don't actually care about drinking every day, and all other activities are not materially affected by having a 1-hour commute to the downtown.

> 1 hour each-way of driving is a lot, and by then you're usually in a different city. 3-4 hours puts you in a different state, and in some places, it puts you in an entirely different country!

Sure. But we're talking about the US in particular.

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.

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.

Trump says a ton of things that he never ends up doing.

Lot costs, builder profits, indirect labour (commissioning, financial and legal affairs, advertising) all are far less affected by tariffs. Machine costs could make up 15% of your "labour and material" cost but depreciation and repair purchases are still only 30% of this, with of course not all of this affected by tariffs.

It seems wholly reasonable to believe that the long term effects of a tariff policy like these on housing costs could indeed be in the ballpark of 5%, as I claim, because in fact housing development is less affected by this.

I'm not sure if you trust this for consensus, but you could try asking an AI to give an estimate of the long-term impact for you. Here's what Gemini 3 Pro said to "Estimate the increase Trump's current tariffs, if long term, would have on price of new housing developments."

> Total Home Price Impact: This translates to a roughly 3% to 4% increase in the final purchase price for the consumer.

The closest thing you have are Japanese Kei cars - you can get a brand-new Suzuki Alto for $6,600 before sales tax, but it would not pass crash US safety standards, it's built for slow city streets of Japan and not highway driving.

The finished products tariff was delayed: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/01/business/trump-furniture-... For unfinished lumber, I don't think there was any tariff going into effect January 1.

Sure, these tariffs may further increase the house of prices (e.g. be relevant to 15% of the cost of the house, with tariffs ranging from 20% to 50% and sources of materials adjusting to these tariffs), but the say 4% future effect of these tariffs is likely less than the effect of zoning laws, other development restrictions, and rent freezing.

Common misconception, I used to have this as well.

Building is more expensive than buying for 2 reasons:

1- People can build custom houses to their taste, they pay a premium for that. 2- House prices fluctuate, most of the time house prices are below maximums, it's only during brief periods of time that building houses is suddenly bottlenecked by capital.

Yes, there is an industry behind building houses. Sure people can build homes themselves, that's cheaper than both buying a home, and building a commercial home, but for homes that are both a commoditized asset with general appeal and a house to live in, it's a different type of asset.

A house you build by yourself will never be worth much, but you'll live in it for sure. You can even spend a lot in improvements, but you end up with YOUR house, not with a resellable asset.

FWIW, building your house is quite independent of market conditions, so if that's your game you shouldn't care about the macroeconomics of industrial residential construction or tariffs on China's iron.

It makes things slightly worse for people who want a non-apartment house but think they might move soon.

But if the president says 'we're gonna take away mayors powers to restrict housebuilding', you won't be pissed yet.... And when a builder comes along to build later it'll be too late.

"President Donald Trump has delayed new tariff increases on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets, and vanities for a year, pushing their implementation to 2027, according to a White House statement."

For example in New York City go take a walk in the streets next to hundred-year-old skyscrapers in downtown. It’s miserable to me. Now go walk alongside midcentury skyscrapers in midtown. It’s much better. The difference is entirely because of shadows cast by the skyscrapers. The visceral reaction from shadows is so strong to me that I am wholeheartedly supporting restrictions on casting shadows.

Now on two-acre lots. That’s not something I care about. Even 0.1 acres of land is too much maintenance for me. But it will be non-negotiable for someone else.

It seems obvious to most people that institutional investors should not be allowed near single family homes and you would need quite a strong argument to persuade otherwise.

This is why everyone on the internet screeches "well I put up a deck and it wasn't so hard". Try and do a new build of literally any structure and get back to me. Or worse, a construction type that is not the regional default for whatever it is you're doing.

Reality for new construction is way, way, way worse than homeowners think.

Unless you know a guy, in which case it's all open doors and green lights because that's how local politics always is.

Rental housing is an important part of housing, and giving access to the schools in suburbs through rental opportunities seems good to me. The people I know who have rented a SFH in my area have had better experiences with corporate landlords than home-owning landlords because the home-owning landlords frequently evict their tenants so that a relative can move in, which is super disruptive. California allows homeowners to evict people with very little warning that way, without cause. Corporations can't do that and also follow the law better.

As far as investing: Every home owner treats it as their primary asset. Which is the only reason that corporations are getting in on the game: people living in their own homes have changed regulatory structures so much that it's rigged in favor of owners.

Single family homes owed by corporations are rented out to people to live in them, giving access to neighborhoods that were not accessible before.

If you think that's "economist inspired" well it's no more inspired than your statements!

There was a vote about a measure to change up some tenant's rights in the city code (strengthening them).

It passed 12-1. One dissenter, a Mrs [can't remember] Greene.

Didn't think anything of it until someone pointed out "Oh, you mean [can't remember] Greene, wife of Jim Greene, owner and CEO of the second largest PM company in the County, Greene Property Management?"

"Someone should ask her whether she's representing her constituents or her husband and his clients."

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.

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).

https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/mortgage-market-and-hous...

https://www.sifma.org/issues/market-structure/housing-financ...

I mean BlackRock and Blackstone creating securities backed by real estate in general, not only single family homes.

What if this new type of asset signals to the broader real estate market that regulators favor large investors?

Even more likely, what if this new type of asset succeeds at the expense of first time home buyers?

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/corporations-arent-the-reason-...

Quoting Thompson:

"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common confusion: The investment firm Blackstone, not BlackRock, established Invitation Homes. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)

Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."

That depends on demand. If no one wants to buy homes at the prices offered, prices will drop.

That being said, it sounds like a land value tax might be a better approach to my first suggestion. Regardless, this would not effect people that truly "own and live in their only house"

Luxury housing is exempt from rent-control laws in places where those exist.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-c...

You've also encouraged your middle class to massively over-leverage themselves to a single house/apartment by creating a huge tax subsidy for them (from 30-75%), which will no doubt continue placing upward pressure on house prices and also create risks if interest rates increase. Why would you not take the biggest loan the bank will offer, given interest rates are quite low in Europe and you will not be taxed on most of the value of that property you can acquire with leverage?

Crazy thought, did your politicians ever think about the idea of NOT subsidizing the demand side at all? If the issue is the price of housing, subsidizing demand for it in any way is going to make that problem worse!

And as if it was ordered, a news story[1] on exactly that this morning. Last year alone the average price for a rental unit went up 6.3%, and simultaneously a record number of apartments were sold. So very unlikely to come down.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner...

So long as landlords grow their business by increasing the total stock of housing, no harm is done.

I'm not sure this is true. Based on a couple articles I found, this is what the current situation looks like in USA:

a) Billionaires, (of whom there are about 1,000) own about 5% of the wealth

b) Millionaires, (of whom there are about 25 million, or 7% of the population, excluding billionaires) own about 74% of the wealth

This tracks with my impression of the rental market. Most rent money isn't going to the billionaires or big corporations, it's going to the 10 million or so mom-and-pop rental property owners.

I'm not an expert on this stuff by any means, but my intuition is that it's a cycle, wherein the rental system is one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality in the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentrat...

Correct.

It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system

To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.

Where's the water coming from.

As near as I can tell, it is just a different way of deciding how the property tax burden is levied.

Downtown property gets taxed much more. Un-developed speculation property that doesn't contribute to the community (and derives value from other people's contributions) get taxed at the same rate as nearby developed property.

* Subsidizing first-time buyers will increase home prices. That's the opposite of the point.

Well-established effect and it applies to everything. A huge portion of all technological improvement/productivity gains and nearly all public investment money ultimately accrues to land rents which we then later just call "the cost of living."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

I just plugged in some numbers using (estimated) purchase price, taxes, HOA for the unit I'm in now, and it would cost me a little over $1M over 30 years to own a $300,000 1br apt.

As someone that's renting because buying is impossible i think this would be fantastic. They should do it with Airbnb too.

Not American or in the US, this is problem everywhere now. People thinking they're entrepreneurs for gouging.

People will come up with all kinds of reasoning, its the property tax, it's migrants, its minimum wage, it's millennials, it's inflation ,when ultimately it's just that landlords will charge whatever they think they can get away.

and sometimes they'll try to charge in other ways...

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/...

That's what people with disproportionate access to capital would want people to believe. It absolutely matters if there's a ceiling and a floor on the production rate of every aspect of the supply chain of housing. If it doesn't matter how many houses someone owns, then it wouldn't matter if builders don't outpace the ability for particularly wealthy people to borrow and own as much as they possibly can. It's a particular type of commodity that should be appropriately controlled in a way that reduces the whole "tragedy of the commons" type effect.

There's always a finite supply, and there's always some contingent of people who will try and get as much as they possibly can, leveraging as much generational wealth as they need to, if they need to.

There should absolutely be a limit on the number of homes, within a particular region, someone should be able to buy, as long as a sufficient threshold is met for what can reasonably be called a scarcity problem. If an individual average home of any type would require the mean family income to quadruple in order to service the mortage, or the downpayment would require 5x their annual salary pre-tax, that seems like a very liberal threshold.

Why would the institution turn away free money but individuals owning the houses wouldn’t?

> Besides all this says is that it matters for blackstone...not for the housing market at large.

It means that blackstone cares about this, which means they like buying houses, which means it matters.

And the stock dropped 6% today. That is what matters.

In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.

The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.

We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.

This action would have an impact.

Other problems will ALWAYS remain. That's no reason not to make a dent in what can be dented.

Why is this a problem? Build more homes, get rich from the Swedes!

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi... https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corpora...

It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.

The fact that there is a housing crisis in most of the western world seems to prove this

In the past, we had that incidentally or almost "accidentally" as new industries would create or vastly expand existing towns, and development would occur around them.

Now most "work" is more fluid, and doesn't build company towns, instead you get endless suburbs expanding off an existing city, even when they're technically their "own legal framework".

Even after we moved off the "factory town" type new cities, the suburb development wasn't a major issue because each new exurb usually involved a new highway direct to the city center - but new highways have been rare mainly because all the "reasonable" ones have been built now.

You could either create demand for cities somehow (look at Las Vegas, built out of nowhere) or you could use high-speed commuter rail to empty areas to give room for a seed to grow.

I don't see how you have more recourse against a company with lawyers that can ignore you, and mom-and-pop. The latter are much more likely to respond to reason.

Of course, any landlord can be bad.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1051941654/zillow-will-stop-b...

And businesses can already expense that tax, so it's 20% off, while individuals have been subject to the SALT cap

Less supply couldn't possibly be helpful for those disappointed, but also there's less supply than there would be if access to it as a commodity was limited, supposing that all other artificial restrictions and funding models could rely on less concentrated investments, which I think they could

Keep in mind, about half of all adults are married, so each couple can own two properties. One to live in, one to rent.

I imagine we could figure out some way to handle inheritance, perhaps we could give somebody 12 months to decide which house the want to keep, and which to sell.

Nothing like middle school economics to help a debate along ... have you checked on the level of economic activity that is due to those 30M foreign nationals, and considered if there might be any downsides to them no longer being here (and presumably not being replaced by other foreign nationals) ?

If cocoa prices spike, you buy less chocolate. If housing prices spike in your job market, your options are: pay more, endure a brutal commute, or uproot your life. The demand is far more inelastic.

I can easily live a full and meaningful life without owning gold, drinking cocoa or eating mustard. Those aren't essential and have decent substitutes.

Electricity is essential, just like housing and it's very highly regulated.

So much of the wealth of our middle- and upper-class is dependent on property ownership and rent-seeking, it's depressing. That population essentially needs to vote against their own self-interest to help improve housing affordability, so it's hard to see that ever happening. The best I could foresee is a government forecasting a stepped reduction of relevant tax benefits over time (e.g. in three years negative gearing gets reduced by half, then half again the following year, etc.) and then future governments honouring that commitment. As you pointed out though, it's a surefire way for any Australian political party to shoot themselves in the face.

I sometimes wonder how strong the demand needs to get for more-affordable housing before the market responds enough to matter. State and local govt could likely have a role in unlocking infill developments and increasing the allowed densities, but I'm not plugged into the planning system. I also strongly agree that state government should be more proactive as a housing supplier (in conjunction with private industry).

Now imagine trying to asses the potential problems with a living space before committing the next 30 years of those payments, plus locking yourself into that single living space and taking on the single and sole responsibility for repairing or addressing all of those problems yourself.

Look, I really like owning my own home, but when I signed a rental agreement, for the duration of the agreement that was the most money I would ever spend on my housing. And I never once worried about replacing a roof, or replacing an HVAC unit, or replacing a water main. I've owned my own home now for over a decade and my monthly housing expenditure is nearly 2x what it was when I started between tax increases, insurance increases and loans to pay for the various major repairs, and that's with a fixed rate primary mortgage. And that's my cost increases AFTER the insurance payouts. The townhome I first rented when I moved to the area currently rents for about $100 LESS than I pay each month. Granted when I bought the place, it was renting for about $200 more per month than I was paying but that basically means renting vs buying was a wash as far as costs go. Yes, to a degree I got unlucky, but that's also the point, I couldn't know if I was going to be unlucky or not before agreeing to the mortgage. As a renter I could get reviews and recommendations or warnings from prior tenants and at least have a chance of knowing what I was getting into.

Also, houses get older every day. Tastes change - ranch, open-plan, multi-story, multi family get more or less valued as time goes on. Not just 'fewer houses means better resale value'. In fact, a shortage may not change housing prices at all - sometimes it just makes them sell faster.

It's easy to take a complex picture, connect a dot or two and draw a line from someplace to some conclusion. But it's always a trickier picture than that. You gotta consider more dots and connect them all.

I live in Wyoming. We don't tax labor. Just extraction, consumption (sales), some investments and property. Our property is still expensive.

> If homeowners were faced with the economic reality of their choices then markets would fix land use by themselves

The problem begins and ends with supply restrictions.

This would make the situation slightly better for people who want to buy houses.

Perhaps it's the case I'm 100% for this mainly because my extremely low expectations for politicians have been met and exceeded in this circumstance.

I don't know why we have to be negative about something that makes a small improvement in something that sucks.

The public, i.e. the people on this planet, have a right to know who is claiming to own which part of the grass and soil that we all share.

This is a really complicated and broad topic that I cant take the time to type out here. I do not stand on the side of "I have nothing to hide." I fully understand the risks of that position. People must keep some secrets to protect themselves from society. Especially as everything devolves into increasingly strict "purity" tests.

With that said, I don't think the right to obfuscate real estate transactions is the same as spicy personal beliefs/private conversations/etc. IMO there is nothing more public than real estate. I do not consider real estate transactions as protected speech nor one that can be legally hidden. We live in this world together.

I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.

And you're claiming that the reaction to opposing state control and socialism is socialism? Not compelling.

Where they buy those homes matters though. In areas with lots of jobs/growth (often the areas experiencing the most housing price pain), that number is likely much higher.

The intermediate players "electricity retailers" then participate in a day ahead and real time market to fulfill their obligations to their customers. This is a good summary (https://chatgpt.com/share/696170d5-5d08-8002-a0ff-e2f45e42c4...) - if you hate ai links, so be it, this is a good description of an esoteric topic.

You'll find most markets actually work this way. When I go to the supermarket to buy sugar, the price isn't jumping around real time with the underlying price of sugar. Same for coffee etc. But it changes with a lag, and consumers respond and the effects flow through even if not in real time. Similar things occur in most markets where there is a wholesale market for something and then several players between that market and the consumer, each player doing some combination of logistics, risk eating, aggregation/disaggregation etc.

The trigger of re-evaluation also hurts banks's balance sheet. Crediting Rating agency, a whole lots of other financial institution. i.e Their interest is to not let it fall.

The problem is, you can’t do that at the federal level, and the people who vote at the local level are the homeowners who benefit from housing restrictions.

The federal government has a very difficult task. They want to make home prices basically stay flat for a long time, and they have limited tools with which to do it since they can’t do the one thing every economist agrees would solve the problem.

So you have attractive locations being completely dominated by rentable corporate owned housing and the net outcome is that people are completely boxed out of home ownership. There's no way pricing comes down because they do this in areas where people are willing to pay top dollar to live.

I live near Ann Arbor and we're seeing it play out right now--more dense housing in the inner core is being allowed (as current thinking says should be done) and whats happening is that smaller old-timey landlords and homeowners are being pushed out and their homes and apartment buildings are being replaced with brand new high dollar rentals. Not condos (although there are some of those as well, but fewer), rentals. And the rental prices are going up! Normal people get pushed further and further from the attractive areas to live, and pressure from these people moving out pushes up rent in the surrounding areas.

EDIT: A quick web search shows that an estimated annual cost of $50-$400 for a registered agent in CA. So the cost is closer to $1k/yr.

But you are a well trained NPC, repeating all the installed “knowledge” you have faithfully, with no ability to even realize the inherent contradictions in your statements and beliefs, largely because what you have been conditioned with like a good mindless NPC is only what the ruling class wants you to know for a fact and then infect others with in places like Reddit. You’re a good zombie infecting and devouring those brains, lacking any ability to recognize you serve those who hate you and you say you hate.

But not matter how angry reality makes you, it does not change whether you hear it from me or not at all.

You are an inherent contradictions, just like the ruling class wants you.

The rich person gets to rent the house, while the "newly weds" are living in it. And most importantly - the house itself will appreciate in value at a rate near 5%

Assuming they both buy a $500k house w/ a 20% down payment and a 5% loan. Realistically the young couple would get a worse rate but lets say they both get 5%. Monthly payment is $2,522.29 w/ taxes and insurance lets call it $3000 a month.

The newly weds are just eating that entire cost every month for 30 years, whereas the Rich landlord rents it out. After a quick and dirty Zillow search lets assume $3500 a month rent to start, so he's making $500 a month profit on an asset thats already increasing in value 5% ish per year.

So, with these assumptions: - Home cost increases 2% a year - Rental price increases 3% a year - Home value increases 5% a year

Total rental profit is $537k Final home value is $1.56 M Total Loan cost: $873k

Bringing the landlords return on 100k to be $1.224M in profit over 30 years (Final sell price - total loan cost + rental profit assuming they stuff it under a mattress). Whereas $100k at a 5% yearly return will be ~$430k

disclaimer: Im not the best with Excel and ive never actually bought property so im sure there are flaws in my math.