Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment.
Here's one who comes right out and explains this:
> Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approvals are not forthcoming, at least in an expeditious manner and needed supply is simply not provided. Recently I heard of a new acronym to add to my vocabulary: CAVE, Citizens Against Virtually Everything, to be added to NIMBYISM and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).
Support groups like https://yimbyaction.org/ if you want to 'stick it to the investors'. If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on.
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick with the county and they are charging me based on the size of my parcel rather than the number of hookups I need. My house is actually in the county (but in the city impact zone). So now I'm spending my time combing through legal records, state supreme court case rulings, etc. all relevant to my situation to try to get things resolved. Literally everything is a fight. I even had to push and fight to get a build-right for the parcel - because it is currently zoned ag - which my country requires a max house density of 40 acres per house. I could rezone - but that would require me to get permission of all my neighbors to rezone so that my new residential zoning would be contiguous with existing residential zoning. I've had to fight to get permission to have an arch/rainbow driveway. Then I wanted to have an accessory dwelling, but ag zoning doesn't allow this either - never mind that this is totally allowed for all residential zoning types in the county and nearby city. And on and on. I've spent several hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars trying to jump through all these hoops - and I haven't even started building anything yet!
They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices.
Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops complaining a developer wants to build flats. For heaven's sake, people need to live somewhere, please do build.
I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception.
We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land.
Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been the most dense townhome development in 4 counties.
There is uniform agreement that people want commercial projects built there as zoned, but I wonder if the opposition would be classified as NIMBY?
And, at least in California, realtors will always push prices up. It’s pretty much never in their best interest to lower the price. Even the buyer’s agent gets paid a percentage of the sale price, so if they try to lower it they’d be essentially working against themselves. And this is without even accounting for all the schemes realtors create (like listing below market to get a lot of offers and create artificially high demand to put pressure on the top offers to increase their bids as high as possible, as well as make them waive their contingencies).
In Queens and Brooklyn, before the Amazon NYC Headquarters was derailed, they had bus tours of Chinese investors, driving around, looking for for sale signs. It was crazy.
Also, the low supply of new houses already created a market for them to control. If there’s already a bottleneck, then half your job is already done. Buy everything up, and continue buying new ones at a decent rate to maintain the bottleneck. A veritable housing OPEC controlling the outflow and production of homes. Sinister stuff.
Congress absolutely needs to do something about this.
Not only investment but also as a safe holding of value or shadow banking unit of account. Once you get enough money there's no safe place to keep it. While banks are relatively low friction, real estate ownership is like an account with the state, "guaranteed" by our attachment to the structure of our society and the government's "monopoly" on legitimate violence.
This is a dumb investment. In order for the entier country to not descend into dysfunctional chaos there will have to be statewide laws that prevent this sort of brain damage.
When that happens there will be nothing keeping the prices of individual housing units in these areas up.
This explains why the price per unit is very high, but the land itself is valuable in the first place because there's high demand for it and that land would be even more valuable if it were legal to build more units on it, which would lower the price per unit, but increase the overall value of the investment.
I would not call it artificially constrained supply. New construction in the vicinity has an effect on the quality of life in the existing houses/flats.
In the end space is indeed physically constrained, especially where people want to live.
Even from that scarcity perspective a lot of low density construction just seems like waste.
I guess you could get both perspectives behind a Georgism type land value tax.
Is there a market in the US where density and population growth has made land cheaper? I can't think of one.
Development increases the value of land in the long run, that's nearly tautological; investors in land will benefit from this increase just like the developers themselves do. I think there's a high likelihood that the markets for "home with land" and "condo" diverge further in the future. Increased demand and density only increases the scarcity of single family homes with actual plots of land in popular areas.
There are a lot of vacant/under-utilized properties, especially ones zoned commercial, next to high-demand residential areas in my town. The owners seem to be just sitting on the property and waiting, vs actually fully making use of it currently.
I'd go a step further: why are we arguing about single-family homes when we have homeless people camped out around unused commercial and industrial properties? That's the property that's being wasted and could most-easily be re-utilized. If you have continual high demand it will be difficult to add supply fast enough once you run out of empty surrounding land (that's the biggest difference between the big coastal cities and the Phoenix/Dallas/Atlantas of the world) because it requires demolition and higher-density construction), but at the very least if you're in that situation, attack the empty areas harder!
(Whether or not there's ANY good sustainable long-term solution for perpetual demand growth is another question entirely...)
Why artificially? People move into single family dwelling neighborhoods because they have lower crime and better schools. There’s nothing artificial about selecting the best environment for yourself and your family.
Is it necessary to artificially editorialize when you’re making what is, at its root, a thinly veiled socio-political point?
If you could unravel all perverse effects of American localist planning and regulation, it would be great.
But if the idea is just "let the developers build where they want and that solves everything", that idea is wrong. Developers don't want to build the dense, affordable house that's needed. Developers want to take advantage of the existing housing and housing expectation and build one bigger house or bigger development one ring out among the suburbs.
What's needed is dense construction near to cities and regulations to support that. And "Yimby" and so forth aren't supporting no regulations, they're supporting pure developer friendly regulations, which won't do anything but give them a piece of the present perverse "gold rush".
> they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply
And then the same middle-class (mostly white, with some Asian mix on the West Coast) plays the "revolt game" of supporting the Afro-American and Latino US population, blaming the latter's condition only on racism, totally ignoring the class war now unfolding in the States of which they (said middle-class) are the "baddies" part. Absolutely appalling.
Housing is not a normal rational market like a market for shoes, every ecobonist knows that much.
Housing supply cannot, and never could fix the problem. There is no city or country in the world where this has ever succeeded.
The house prices are rising because of increasing financialisation of our economy, cheap credit and low interest rates.
700,000 people left London during pandemic, put prices keep rising.
If we offered 300 year long mortgages that get passed on to your next of kin, house prices would quadruple overnight. The price of a house has no relationship to it's utility, like it does for all other goods. You know you will always be able to sell it for more to the bext sucker.
You lost me at the end. You lack political acumen if you think this is how politics works: " If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on."
The Yimbies supported Mayor Breed. She hasn't changed the political problems in SF that you're (for the most part, accurately) diagnosing here.
The problem with most anti-activist government screeds like this is that they lack the same nuance and sophistication they would bring to, for example, commenting on a market analysis. I'm almost certain your position here is "end zoning." I'm fine with that. But it takes way more than shit posting, and the people who believe what you do are literally at the top of the city's government in San Francisco, and nothing has changed.
You need a better understanding of politics and a sharper theory of change. Just applying your own premise to this comment, investors are actually relying on people like YOU failing to learn more about politics and failing to understand how to better communicate about politics. YOU are part of the problem, not above it.
If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often without renting anything out) that it is in their economic self-interest to block any such proposals. Although, I suppose this situation isn't unique. The world has long been doomed by coordination problems.
This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low.
All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well.
Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Every year the gap between poor and rich grows larger as a result.
This hurts people who already own houses, too - property taxes are assessed on the appraised value of the home, which is a function of what the similarly-sized houses in your area sold for most recently. My property taxes have increased 10% every year for the past several years (and it would have been more if not for a legislative 10% annual cap). I worry that there will come a day when I've paid off my mortgage but won't be able to afford to pay the real estate tax any more.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but houses should not be used as investments.
Every person on the planet has the need and the right to live somewhere.
Unfortunately the way it works today, allow a small fraction of the population to buy more and more houses at the expense of the majority of people who are constantly out bidden and forced to rent, thus fueling this circle. Landlord get richer, buys more houses and so on.
The only way to stop this is taxes! Should not be convenient
to buy houses for the sole purpose of renting them amount, especially for foreigners, see Denmark.
The problem (I think) is that the Fed has dumped too much money into the system. There are no assets left to buy at reasonable prices. So now investors are buying homes.
This is the downside to the current "bailout". I think the last "bailout" was a bit more lean. People were hurt, but in different ways than they are today.
My personal experience. With mega rental companies.
I moved into one of Invitation homes a few years ago. Looked nice when we drove up, didn’t think about why all the windows were open when we signed paperwork.
Their negligence nearly killed my family, and left us with life long injuries.
The gas line was leaking natural gas, improper installation? the furnace and stove were emoting lethal levels of carbon monoxide. Detector was defective.
A portion of the AC fell into the kids room. One wall got so hot it burned my wife. Only reason we didn’t die is smell was so bad we nearly always had all windows open.
At every stage they lied and did what they could to cover up problems.
66,781,000 Detached Single Family Homes in the US [0]
$272,400 median home selling price in the US, 2020 [1]
That's just over $18 Trillion for the entire US Detached Single Family Home market. I'd be interested to know how much Blackrock has budgeted for this fund (and how much of the spend is leveraged, and up to what number. And who else is doing the same type of fund and to what magnitude).
Note that per Statista, the median home price is anticipated to increase from $272,400 to $324,000 between Q4 2020 and Q2 2022. That's a 20% increase in real estate over an 18 month period. Given that we're seeing this story now, Blackrock likely executed these purchases many months ago. Their fund is likely leveraged, making the potential profits huge.
It looks like a very high-stakes play by Blackrock, which I know to be a hedge fund, so perhaps part and parcel of their business.
>It looks like a very high-stakes play by Blackrock
In what sense? That housing could collapse in price after they made a large investment in it (and since housing is a huge market, Blackrock could have leveraged up to a higher amount than typical)?
Market cap of Apple is over $2 Trillion, they could have leveraged pretty far into this too.
The problem is the government mandated houses be piggy banks for middle class people, all but allowing large institutional investors to take advantage of the rule system put in place to protect and increase prices: low interest rates, local control of land use (to kill new supply), etc. It was a side effect to allow others to benefit from the scheme.
> The country’s most prolific home builder [DR Horton] booked roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to investors.
The reason is simple. Individual buyers avoid high-rental areas because they know the renters will depress home values. This sets up a reinforcing cycle. The neighborhood fills up with renters with no incentive to invest in the costly maintenance required to keep properties attractive. Landlords have little incentive to invest in long-term improvements, either.
Tragedy of the commons. Step by step, the neighborhood slides into the abyss.
So let the Blackrock's of the world buy up entire neighborhoods and turn them into rentals. As soon as the inevitable mean reversion happens in house prices, these home rental businesses will be toast.
I chuckled at the headline because financial planners have always said that owning real estate for renting out was a more reliable source of retirement income than anything else. However, it is annoying at how some places where there is strong demand, there are few new projects going up. I personally have been amazed at how much new housing has been (and is currently being) developed in the "south bay" (which are the communities Mtn View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose.
Ever since mixed commercial/residential started getting approved we've had over a dozen large re-developments of lots that were purely commercial/industrial into mixed residential / commercial. The entire AMD and former Spansion campuses have been re-done this way and produced both hundreds of new homes and several new commercial leasing opportunities. Sunnyvale's revised downtown went from 100% commercial to 50 / 50 commercial and residential. So that is pretty amazing to me.
Sigh. They know land is the real wealth. And since current buying generation does not know this, it's ripe to snap up. In addition it is very hard for the current generation to even own. This is were I detest free market economy because it creates such an unfair situation. And this leads me to think things like houses should be capped. Everyone should be able to have a piece of land and a home. Corporations can lease land from cities but should never own. The idea here is simple, corporations cannot be treated the same as an individual human.
When you add the no-interest rate environment that creates price bubbles and mortgagtes where people never build significant equity, this destroys the ability of families to build wealth, it turns young people into urbanized share cropping serfs. I guess young people can look forward to owning nothing and being happy about it?
The only people who can compete to own property in an environment like this are the extremely wealthy, or those of very independent means. This marks the end of opportunity for generations of working people.
A.k.a. The Carvana model. This is what Carvana and other "no-haggle, no-test-drive" startups are doing with the whole used car market in many areas. They aggresively buy up all the used cars in an area (or at least as many as they can) from dealerships and private sellers in order to make themselves the only entity with used cars for sale. Which they happen to be selling at 20% above true market value. But hey, you can buy the car from an app on your phone without the burden of haggling with a salesman or even a test-drive!
I hope that holds. I have a buddy/tenant that is waiting for an IPO this month. When it finally drops, he'll know what he can afford and then he'll start house shopping. I likely won't be able to have my house on the market until August.
Over are the days where supply and demand controlled allocation of resources to get the goods to every man, woman and child.
Big demand, lack of workers? Price and pay rise to meet the challenge. This part of market economy always made sense to me. Like a muscle growing stronger in response to increased exertion.
Now the wealthy have decided that this is way too boring because what good does it do them if people actually attain wealth for themselves? There'll be no motivation to run faster in their hamster wheels to create more wealth to be siphoned off.
We should increase (double?) property taxes on single-family residences owned by corporations.
These shifts in the housing market are destroying the middle class as an increasing number of Americans will never own any equity in their residences over their lifetimes.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|4 years ago|reply
Here's one who comes right out and explains this:
> Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approvals are not forthcoming, at least in an expeditious manner and needed supply is simply not provided. Recently I heard of a new acronym to add to my vocabulary: CAVE, Citizens Against Virtually Everything, to be added to NIMBYISM and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).
https://www.clearcapllc.com/2021/04/27/q1-2021-clear-capital...
Support groups like https://yimbyaction.org/ if you want to 'stick it to the investors'. If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on.
[+] [-] rwcarlsen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bennysomething|4 years ago|reply
Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops complaining a developer wants to build flats. For heaven's sake, people need to live somewhere, please do build.
[+] [-] brightball|4 years ago|reply
We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land.
Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been the most dense townhome development in 4 counties.
There is uniform agreement that people want commercial projects built there as zoned, but I wonder if the opposition would be classified as NIMBY?
[+] [-] ta1234567890|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srj|4 years ago|reply
- Most American households own their home.
- Homeowners vote at substantially higher rates than renters.
- Home equity is one of the largest components of American wealth (roughly equal with retirement accounts).
Taken together it's difficult to see how home values will be allowed to fall.
[+] [-] rcpt|4 years ago|reply
A portfolio of several thousand Prop 13 jackpots is a pretty good situation to be in.
[+] [-] runawaybottle|4 years ago|reply
Congress absolutely needs to do something about this.
[+] [-] erikerikson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakub_g|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_opabinia|4 years ago|reply
I’m pretty sure you’re not sticking it to investors if you support development.
You might be sticking it to different investors.
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
When that happens there will be nothing keeping the prices of individual housing units in these areas up.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|4 years ago|reply
This is what's called a win-win.
[+] [-] kerng|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legulere|4 years ago|reply
I guess you could get both perspectives behind a Georgism type land value tax.
[+] [-] majormajor|4 years ago|reply
Development increases the value of land in the long run, that's nearly tautological; investors in land will benefit from this increase just like the developers themselves do. I think there's a high likelihood that the markets for "home with land" and "condo" diverge further in the future. Increased demand and density only increases the scarcity of single family homes with actual plots of land in popular areas.
There are a lot of vacant/under-utilized properties, especially ones zoned commercial, next to high-demand residential areas in my town. The owners seem to be just sitting on the property and waiting, vs actually fully making use of it currently.
I'd go a step further: why are we arguing about single-family homes when we have homeless people camped out around unused commercial and industrial properties? That's the property that's being wasted and could most-easily be re-utilized. If you have continual high demand it will be difficult to add supply fast enough once you run out of empty surrounding land (that's the biggest difference between the big coastal cities and the Phoenix/Dallas/Atlantas of the world) because it requires demolition and higher-density construction), but at the very least if you're in that situation, attack the empty areas harder!
(Whether or not there's ANY good sustainable long-term solution for perpetual demand growth is another question entirely...)
[+] [-] OldGoodNewBad|4 years ago|reply
Is it necessary to artificially editorialize when you’re making what is, at its root, a thinly veiled socio-political point?
[+] [-] zamfi|4 years ago|reply
...until your neighbors are all renters, at which point the tide turns?
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
But if the idea is just "let the developers build where they want and that solves everything", that idea is wrong. Developers don't want to build the dense, affordable house that's needed. Developers want to take advantage of the existing housing and housing expectation and build one bigger house or bigger development one ring out among the suburbs.
What's needed is dense construction near to cities and regulations to support that. And "Yimby" and so forth aren't supporting no regulations, they're supporting pure developer friendly regulations, which won't do anything but give them a piece of the present perverse "gold rush".
[+] [-] dd36|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
And then the same middle-class (mostly white, with some Asian mix on the West Coast) plays the "revolt game" of supporting the Afro-American and Latino US population, blaming the latter's condition only on racism, totally ignoring the class war now unfolding in the States of which they (said middle-class) are the "baddies" part. Absolutely appalling.
[+] [-] Guest42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mumblemumble|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-08/archeg...
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|4 years ago|reply
Housing supply cannot, and never could fix the problem. There is no city or country in the world where this has ever succeeded.
The house prices are rising because of increasing financialisation of our economy, cheap credit and low interest rates.
700,000 people left London during pandemic, put prices keep rising.
If we offered 300 year long mortgages that get passed on to your next of kin, house prices would quadruple overnight. The price of a house has no relationship to it's utility, like it does for all other goods. You know you will always be able to sell it for more to the bext sucker.
[+] [-] scotuswroteus|4 years ago|reply
The Yimbies supported Mayor Breed. She hasn't changed the political problems in SF that you're (for the most part, accurately) diagnosing here.
The problem with most anti-activist government screeds like this is that they lack the same nuance and sophistication they would bring to, for example, commenting on a market analysis. I'm almost certain your position here is "end zoning." I'm fine with that. But it takes way more than shit posting, and the people who believe what you do are literally at the top of the city's government in San Francisco, and nothing has changed.
You need a better understanding of politics and a sharper theory of change. Just applying your own premise to this comment, investors are actually relying on people like YOU failing to learn more about politics and failing to understand how to better communicate about politics. YOU are part of the problem, not above it.
[+] [-] cosmojg|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
[+] [-] adflux|4 years ago|reply
All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well.
Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Every year the gap between poor and rich grows larger as a result.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] WYepQ4dNnG|4 years ago|reply
Every person on the planet has the need and the right to live somewhere.
Unfortunately the way it works today, allow a small fraction of the population to buy more and more houses at the expense of the majority of people who are constantly out bidden and forced to rent, thus fueling this circle. Landlord get richer, buys more houses and so on.
The only way to stop this is taxes! Should not be convenient to buy houses for the sole purpose of renting them amount, especially for foreigners, see Denmark.
[+] [-] timmg|4 years ago|reply
This is the downside to the current "bailout". I think the last "bailout" was a bit more lean. People were hurt, but in different ways than they are today.
[+] [-] deathtraphomes|4 years ago|reply
I moved into one of Invitation homes a few years ago. Looked nice when we drove up, didn’t think about why all the windows were open when we signed paperwork.
Their negligence nearly killed my family, and left us with life long injuries. The gas line was leaking natural gas, improper installation? the furnace and stove were emoting lethal levels of carbon monoxide. Detector was defective.
A portion of the AC fell into the kids room. One wall got so hot it burned my wife. Only reason we didn’t die is smell was so bad we nearly always had all windows open.
At every stage they lied and did what they could to cover up problems.
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|4 years ago|reply
$272,400 median home selling price in the US, 2020 [1]
That's just over $18 Trillion for the entire US Detached Single Family Home market. I'd be interested to know how much Blackrock has budgeted for this fund (and how much of the spend is leveraged, and up to what number. And who else is doing the same type of fund and to what magnitude).
Note that per Statista, the median home price is anticipated to increase from $272,400 to $324,000 between Q4 2020 and Q2 2022. That's a 20% increase in real estate over an 18 month period. Given that we're seeing this story now, Blackrock likely executed these purchases many months ago. Their fund is likely leveraged, making the potential profits huge.
It looks like a very high-stakes play by Blackrock, which I know to be a hedge fund, so perhaps part and parcel of their business.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/377896/owner-occupied-ho...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272776/median-price-of-e...
[+] [-] juloo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harambae|4 years ago|reply
In what sense? That housing could collapse in price after they made a large investment in it (and since housing is a huge market, Blackrock could have leveraged up to a higher amount than typical)?
Market cap of Apple is over $2 Trillion, they could have leveraged pretty far into this too.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-...
I see no future for this model.
The reason is simple. Individual buyers avoid high-rental areas because they know the renters will depress home values. This sets up a reinforcing cycle. The neighborhood fills up with renters with no incentive to invest in the costly maintenance required to keep properties attractive. Landlords have little incentive to invest in long-term improvements, either.
Tragedy of the commons. Step by step, the neighborhood slides into the abyss.
So let the Blackrock's of the world buy up entire neighborhoods and turn them into rentals. As soon as the inevitable mean reversion happens in house prices, these home rental businesses will be toast.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|4 years ago|reply
Ever since mixed commercial/residential started getting approved we've had over a dozen large re-developments of lots that were purely commercial/industrial into mixed residential / commercial. The entire AMD and former Spansion campuses have been re-done this way and produced both hundreds of new homes and several new commercial leasing opportunities. Sunnyvale's revised downtown went from 100% commercial to 50 / 50 commercial and residential. So that is pretty amazing to me.
[+] [-] desktopninja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coverband|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
The only people who can compete to own property in an environment like this are the extremely wealthy, or those of very independent means. This marks the end of opportunity for generations of working people.
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no-dr-onboard|4 years ago|reply
5 days on the market, 4 offers, 1 family, 1 family trust, 2 investment firms. All offers 20-50k over asking, 0 conditions.
[+] [-] igetspam|4 years ago|reply
Congratulations!
[+] [-] RGamma|4 years ago|reply
Big demand, lack of workers? Price and pay rise to meet the challenge. This part of market economy always made sense to me. Like a muscle growing stronger in response to increased exertion.
Now the wealthy have decided that this is way too boring because what good does it do them if people actually attain wealth for themselves? There'll be no motivation to run faster in their hamster wheels to create more wealth to be siphoned off.
Works as intended.
[+] [-] cwkoss|4 years ago|reply
These shifts in the housing market are destroying the middle class as an increasing number of Americans will never own any equity in their residences over their lifetimes.