[delish]

I'll try to invoke Cunningham's Law by saying: Housing is close to a perfectly-competitive market.

I think the above is true, but I'd welcome counterexamples.

So, the way to depress housing prices is to build more houses. _Most_ housing regulations, including making it illegal for people to own four houses, reshuffle the ownership of existing houses, and don't depress their prices. As regards that regulation: if the super-rich aren't able to own $many houses, the merely-rich will buy more, and thus housing prices would be the same.

[Buttons840]

This makes sense to me, if 10 families want a place to live and there are 8 places to live, housing prices will trend towards infinity, until people give up and multiple families live together.

We need more places to live, at the end of the day there's no way around that.

Regulation might help though. If we regulate it so that it's harder to profit from real estate, then people will find other investments instead. This is good, because as long as real estate is a favorite investment for the wealthy, there will be a "mysterious" resistance to any efforts to lower the prices by building more houses.

I'm not an expert here, but this makes sense to me. Did I miss anything?

[aaomidi]

Yes you did miss something.

You missed that it’s 10 families, with 20 houses. With one family owning 18 of them.

[amluto]

> Housing is close to a perfectly-competitive market.

Pick any US jurisdiction (with the possible exception of Puerto Rico? I’m not very familiar with how taxation works there) and contemplate the tax implications of selling an appreciated property. Further contemplate how those implications are different for different potential buyers and sellers of that same property at the same price. Then say again that it’s perfectly competitive.

Hint: there are all manner of effects here. Capital gains. The basis step up at death. 1031 exchanges and their associated rules. Transfer fees, title fees (which is pretty close to being a tax).

(I’m not the one who downvoted you.)

[delish]

Transfer fees and title fees equally affect any buyer and any seller in the long run, don't they?

>Further contemplate how those implications are different for different potential buyers and sellers of that same property at the same price.

Sure -- this is why I was asking for examples. "Rich people having more options than poor people" (which is what I think 1031 exchanges and your nod to capital gains refers to) is true across all domains without exception. It's true that I tend to discount that, acknowledging its unfairness. My point was prices are public(!), and historic sale-prices are public(!). A _particular_ (rich) buyer may have individual reasons for buying a house, but the market is almost perfectly competitive, because prices are public.

[AuryGlenz]

The other way that everyone outside of Canada seems to ignore is get a handle on the demand side of things.

[lostinroutine]

Could you elaborate on Canada's approach? Are you referring to adjustable rate mortgages?