Really. If obsessive zoning and building regulations didn't artificially restrict the supply then there would be no reason for anyone to "invest" in houses.
100%. I'm a far left anticapitalist, but facts are facts. Zoning, restrictive building codes, and the death of much of the housing construction industry post 2007. All contribute to housing costs and homelessness.
I'd like to see zoning opened back up for increasing density wherever it's needed, but I would also like to see a strong social housing policy.
That doesn't strike me as true at all. Nationwide, housing has generally been a "good investment", regardless of whether we're talking about an area that restricts supply or one that does not.
The places where it's a good enough investment for investors to buy up real estate are in these high demand markets where housing supply has massively lagged demand. Homeowners may be satisfied that their home values have increased everywhere, but black Rock isn't buying houses in small towns in Idaho and ohio because the ROI isn't as high.
Rents and home prices have repeatedly fallen in places that have authorized large scale new building. In the past, those price pressures were probably offset by large-scale moves from the northeast and midwest into the Sun Belt, but those appear to have mostly equilibrated now.
An unregulated supply will still offer promising investment opportunities to those with enough money to buy them up. Look at crypto or private equity. These markets are lightly regulated. But prices are bid up by big money. Unfortunately just dumping regulation is unlikely to fix housing.
People say this but then never draw the rest of the owl. It costs money, substantial money, to hold on to a house. As soon as you propose that you're going to close that gap by renting the house out, you're competing in the market with everybody else letting out houses, and supply-and-demand kicks in.
Can you explain the mechanism by which accumulating vacant houses would provide the same reward structure as crypto speculation?
Professional property managers can scale the cost of ownership in a way individual owners can’t.
Besides that speculators can also withhold supply, artificially inflating prices. 2008 occurred due to speculation, independent of NIMBY regulation.
As for crypto, housing can actually be more profitable than crypto since investors see rentier income not just speculative appreciation.
Ultimately, this isn't just a supply-and-demand problem in an idealized market. It's a resource allocation issue where investors with significant capital can hoard housing, driving up costs, while many people struggle with homelessness. Simply greasing the market with deregulation won't solve this fundamental imbalance.
I'm sure they can do lots of things homeowners can't, but they can't defy gravity. Again: I'm looking for an explanation for how investors could come out ahead amassing houses they keep vacant in the face of increasing supply.
A portion of the investor class may divest through deregulation as the character of the housing market changes. But the fundamental issue is the presence of the investor class itself. Markets don’t redistribute wealth equitably; they concentrate it. This will continue even if markets acquire new character through deregulation. At best deregulation can change the membership of the investor class. It does not eliminate the investor class.
In other words you are looking at it from a supply side but ignoring the wealth distribution of buyers. Wealth has further concentrated among the richest buyers over the past few years, while the poorest have grown poor, leading to higher prices for everyone. That’s the cause, not NIMBYism, which has been around forever. It’s a wealth redistribution issue not a deregulation issue.
You're not answering the question I'm asking. I'm not looking for a treatise. I'm just asking how investors keeping vacant supply off the market could make money in the face of increasing supply. They have to pay to hold the houses. They're not earning income from the houses (they're vacant). Supply of the houses is increasing. Fill in the "???" before "profit".
If investors keep houses off the market that artificially reduces supply. All they need is for the increased prices to outweigh any price decline that comes from increased supply. This can happen with or without vacancies for example by having pricing power in the rental market.
House vacancies aren’t my central argument however - they are a symptom of the wealth distribution problem causing our housing crisis.
You didn't answer my question, you defined it away. Obviously, the premise of investors driving housing costs up is that they're artificially reducing supply. Allowing new housing construction increases supply. The question: assume steadily increasing supply --- how are investors making money on this scheme?
It's fine if you just don't have an answer. But then my point is: nobody seems to have an answer about how this is supposed to work.
Pretty sure I answered your question. As long as scarcity effects outpace price declines investors are incentivized to retain vacancies, and it’s not just vacancies but pricing control over rent. The real housing market isn’t effectively modeled by your simplistic abstraction. If you look at a YIMBY darling like Austin, for example, investor owned housing has actually grown, as well as homelessness, despite a modest decline in median price.
Your rebuttal here is a market in which prices declined.
You're clearly trying to route around the question and answer some broader question I didn't ask about how the overall housing market works. I'm not interested. I asked: how can investors make money on this? Your answer is: they don't; they lose money, but I guess do it anyways in order to twirl their mustaches.
The investor class increased as did homelessness in Austin. Not only that but mortgage payments on the median priced home have increased in Austin, comparing 2018-2019 . Houses are even less affordable.
Investors can make money on price fluctuations and rent. And supply increases are neither immediate nor endless, despite what a simplistic model would hold.
Sadly we need structural solutions not superficial answers to the housing crisis.
Suppliers can make money by withholding supply in an inelastic market. Supply and demand effects depend on elasticity to work. It’s not just NIMBYism which contributes to housing’s inelasticity. It is a basic need, with no substitute, and a long time horizon (for building and moving). Pricing power is a motivation for keeping houses off the market (besides just speculation). You seem to think NIMBYism is the only contributor to that.
And investors providing rentals contribute to supply also, sure. Yet pricing power among suppliers plays a role here as well.
My argument is not that increasing YIMBYism is bad, but that it is a meager half measure that can at best nudge housing prices, not fix the essential problem.
For example, even with
a completely efficient and housing supply, with housing selling at cost, people would still be homeless, as homeless people lack money to pay for housing at cost. By ignoring the wealth composition of buyers, we can at best make housing more elastic through YIMBYism, applying a bandaid rather than fundamentally addressing the housing problem itself.
I'm sure you're writing this in good faith, but it really seems like you're trying to slip out from under the question I asked at the top of this thread. "Suppliers can make money by withholding supply in an inelastic market" is an answer to some other question; my question is: stipulating that they can't rent their properties out, and that supply is consistently increasing, how do they make money? All your specific answers have attempted to define away one or both of the premises of that question.
Yeah it does seem like we are talking around each other but I will try again to answer your question.
It depends on the circumstances of the market. Imagine an extreme hypothetical example, where one investor owns 90 out of 100 houses. And one new house is built every ten years. That investor has pricing power. They can essentially charge whatever they want even if it’s means some houses they own are empty (withholding supply). So: it depends on how fast new houses enter the market versus how much pricing power the investor possesses.
(In fact YIMBY doesn’t create an endless new supply. The idea is that it deregulates, facilitating a new supply where there wasn’t one before. That doesn’t constitute an endless supply, just a new one-time shift allowing a finite boost of additional supply.)
Another example: consider a speculative bubble. In a speculative bubble an investor can purchase a house, it can stay empty, there can be new supply coming into the market, but the forces of froth can outpace the force of additional supply, for quite some time. If they sell before the bubble pops, they profit.
Both these examples are of investors withholding supply, new supply coming into the market, and still profiting. Whether prices fall comes down to whether the downward force of new supply outstrips other forces that boost prices.
So what you're saying is that the scenarios you're thinking of where investors hold houses, don't rent them, and still make money all require investors to have monopoly control of the housing market that is maintained regardless of the amount of supply added, and that rather than exploiting inelasticity they exploit irrational speculative bubbles.
OK.
This describes zero investors anywhere in the country. There is no significant market in the US where investors owns even a significant percentage of all houses (the total in California is 19%, and that statistic is dominated by mom-and-pop house speculators that can't buy even two more houses, let alone keep up with continuous added supply).
I'm fine with the idea that we've played this out now. Maybe someone else has a better idea of how investors can beat zoning reform, but for now I'm going to go back to assuming that investors are immaterial to housing scarcity.
My point with these examples is not that they represent the current investor market, but to provide straightforward examples of how factors other than supply can benefit an investors (since it seemed that this point was hard for us to get on the same page about). Instead my actual argument is that investors don’t need monopolies, just pricing power, which is what an inelastic market gives them.
The 19% stat & the mom-and-pop claim you are referring to is actually misleading for our discussion.
> This study included properties for short-term or long-term rentals, second homes, and vacation retreats but did not follow condos or build-to-rent single-family-home projects.
So it only refers to a subset of the housing market. For a better idea of the pricing power investors have we need to include other kinds of rentals. Also from the article:
> Census Bureau stats show 45% of households live in a place they don’t own, the third-highest share of tenants nationally.
The vast majority of that 45% is multifamily housing, which is typically owned by institutions.
This shows a broader picture of the housing market in California. There is huge institutional ownership of housing. It’s far from implausible that these investors lack pricing power.
Unfortunately deregulating them will do much the same. BlackRock promotes YIMBY because that will allow it to expand its rental property portfolio, effectively generating new cashflows from the poor and middle class to wealthy asset owners. In fact deregulation/regulation is a false choice. Cashflow should go in the opposite direction by raises taxing on the wealthy (including real estate investments) and building public housing.
I completely agree we need to tax the rich and build public housing, but we do also need to allow for greater density in metropolitan areas. We have to build more housing and if we aren't increasing density then we're creating sprawl.
Sprawl chews up more and more farmland and forest, lengthens commutes, increases congestion. There's enough subdivisions and single family neighborhoods already.
