Unfortunately that’s correct. I’m insanely lucky that my parents helped me purchase my first home. Barring that, I’d never, ever be able to afford one. It kills me to see friends who work their asses off that still have to rent.
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This is only a feasible strategy because of limitations on building in various areas though.
When and where was this?? Every house I’m looking at is getting literally dozens of offers.
2022 in the Phoenix area. It was within like a day of listing it.
The market is kind of dead in my new area. Someone listed a house for $690k and panic sold for $540k. My other neighbor, who had the same model, listed at $625k and now had to drop it to $525k.
The Minneapolis market isn’t like that at all. Inventory for sale is fairly low but i guess demand isn’t super strong either so it’s kind of a stalemate. Maybe slightly in favor of sellers since prices haven’t really dropped but looking at Zillow there are plenty of houses in the city and inner ring suburbs that have been on market for 30+ days.
Minneapolis is a pretty awesome city too. Would be a great place for people to move who find it too expensive elsewhere.
New supply of housing is good for renters and buyers regardless of whether they are being bought by owner resident or by landlords. If these landlords incentivize more construction by giving homebuilders a predictable market then it’s good for everyone. For example, when someone builds 20 townhomes and sell them all at a pre-fixed price to one buyer this saves the builder a lot of money in marketing expense and eliminates a lot of risk of carrying the properties until a buyer is found, or risk that any specific buyer flakes due to loss of job or financing issues. If this setup incentivizes more construction and gets more supply onto the market, then it is good for prices and not a sign of thing getting worse. In European countries being a lifetime renter is much more common. I don’t think all of those people feel trapped
Cossposting from Trump for the poo-poo-ers of the current economy:
Taking the poll numbers as gospel for the sake of argument, what has Trump done to get these numbers?
Nothing, obviously. It’s frustration with inflation and people having the memories of a goldfish.
Appeal to morons
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I don’t think comparisons to Europe are very helpful here though, they’re not in as deregulated and of a late-stage capitalist system as we are. The issue here is, every time capital gets the chance, it’s going to turn the screws on whoever doesn’t have leverage. Renters will not have leverage, especially in markets where there is more of a limit of available housing within a reasonable distance of where the jobs are.
Further, if we’re in a market condition where the housing prices would drop absent landlords buying them up in bulk, then the landlords buying them up is not good for current renters who want to become buyers. It’s keeping the prices up.
Lower inflation (not his accomplishment, not Biden’s fault, but reality and Biden could have done more to fight it as we’ve argued about ITT), low unemployment (3.6% before COVID, same as now), tax cuts that IIRC came with a letter with his name on it telling people they came from him, stock market did well under him until COVID (not really his accomplishment, nor is it currently Biden’s imo).
Plus at the end of the day everyone knows that economically, a vote for Trump is a vote for tax cuts. Biden’s economic policy/campaign doensn’t have a simple and clear thing everyone is getting.
Wasn’t unemployment really high when he left office? Like really really high?
Its very possible.
You just have to actually build. Chicago does pretty well too
Yeah, as a result of COVID. I specified before COVID. IMO his COVID response made things quite a bit worse than they had to be, but no matter who was president, the unemployment rate was going to go up.
Sure seems like Biden should start messaging that he’s great for the economy!
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The issue here is, every time capital gets the chance, it’s going to turn the screws on whoever doesn’t have leverage. Renters will not have leverage, especially in markets where there is more of a limit of available housing within a reasonable distance of where the jobs are.
Renters would have an advantage when they’re the political majority. A lot of the issues in US housing market are due to local governments being beholden to local homeowners. Cities can enact their own landlord tenant laws in favor of tenants if there is a political will.
The idea that landlords are able to turn the screws on tenants is a byproduct of market conditions and demand for housing relative to supply.
Further, if we’re in a market condition where the housing prices would drop absent landlords buying them up in bulk, then the landlords buying them up is not good for current renters who want to become buyers. It’s keeping the prices up.
Landlords buying up new construction should increase the number of rental units on the market which should put downward pressure on rents, which should then make buying houses less financially attractive to landlords. From my perspective, everything you are saying is just a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of housing supply. There are several factors why there is a lack of housing supply, but IMO it is mostly due to local governments, who are overly beholden to homeowners and have to consider political blowback from any policy that would reduce the housing values of their voters.
Ehhh, even if it gets to that point, they may be the majority of voters but the big donors will be doing their best to make sure renters don’t get any policy wins.
In theory it should, but there’s also a lot of price collusion among the big landlords. There was a lawsuit over this a couple years ago iirc, they were all using the same third party company to help them “optimize” their prices and thus prices didn’t respond to normal market forces.
But landlords buying up houses does drive up prices for potential buyers.
At the end of the day this is late stage capitalism with a lot of regulatory capture, and I suspect we have a ways to go before things snap back the other way.
Yes if people aren’t going to vote for their interests, then policy will favor others. I am not so bleak about this. I think local politics don’t usually work the same way as national politics, in terms of social issues being wedge issues that cause voters to go against their economic interests.
Even with collusion these landlords don’t have the market anywhere near cornered. This sort of thing just wouldn’t have a sustainable impact in the housing market equilibrium price without a grater market share, and the landlords would go broke dealing with vacancy and all the accompanying issues and expenses that entails. Corporate landlords can’t just buy these properties and sit on them for months and years waiting for someone to pay the over market rent.
As an aside, you keep using this term “late stage capitalism”, and to be direct I know it is kind of a trendy label but I think it is a lazy and stupid term that has an unclear definition. I don’t think it adds anything to the discussion unless you want to offer a more clear definition what it means to you and why this period of history is unique in that regard
You need to go look up what has been happening with RealPage. Your post is stupid and every part of it outside the fairly obvious first paragraph is wrong.
Late stage capitalism is the point where the ‘economy’ keeps growing but living standards for most workers are falling. It’s the stage where government regulations are written entirely by corporate interests to increase barriers to entry without actually providing any value whatsoever to consumers. It’s Citizens United, it’s a Supreme Court owned by corporate/fossil fuel interests, it’s a media owned by a small number of incredibly wealthy people. All of this while we simply pretend climate change isn’t real on a global level because that would impact economic growth (which all goes to the ownership class).
It’s getting worse. Every single day. They have all of the power and anytime anyone who isn’t them flexes any power at all the government they’ve totally captured passes a law making that form of power illegal. It’s in the name: capitalism. Capital, the preservation and maximized growth of it, is prioritized over everything else. You turbocharge that ideology with truly cancerous concepts like efficient market hypothesis and the idea that a corporations only duty is to its shareholders and you get where we are on the way to where we’re going.
The trend from the period of the black death to present is toward equality. The commoners have come a long way from serfdom, but we have a long way still to go. Currently we are hopefully coming toward the end of a period where the reactionary elements of society (read the ownership/aristocratic classes) managed to regain power after the New Deal coalition broke up after civil rights. Since Nixon was elected things have gotten steadily worse for workers in nearly every way despite rather massive productivity increases.
Trying to tell people the house isn’t on fire is bad because it’s a stupid thing to say. When you want to persuade people of things a good starting point is to say something smart/true.
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