U.S. Will Track Secret Buyers of Luxury Real Estate | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Will Track Secret Buyers of Luxury Real Estate

nytimes.com

73 pointswalterbell70 comments

"Under the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the Treasury is already authorized to require real estate companies to scrutinize real estate buyers, but the department has in the past faced fierce lobbying against issuing such rules"

This article leaves out some important background details about why this was ever a thing to begin with. Real estate professionals have lobbied for and gotten an exception to the FinCEN reporting requirements that were passed under the PATRIOT act in 2002. The exception is a 'temporary' one but it has been continuously renewed since 2002. That is largely why this problem exists at all.

The 2002 law imposed reporting requirements on businesses that accepted cash in transactions over $10k. The exemption for real estate left it as one of the only practical ways to make a large cash transaction that wouldn't end up in a so called 'suspicious activity report' being submitted to FinCEN.

Real Estate lobbiests have a lot of power, and are surprising effective.

In CA a few years ago they wanted Gov. Schwartzeneger to sign a bill requiring all Realestae sales persons to be working for a broker for two years before striking out on their own to become Brokers. He saw the their wasen't a need to change the system, and vetoed it. He said, "Why decrease supply? We haven't had one instance where a new broker screwed up."

We all know what it takes to peddle Realestae. Eight courses and a lot of networking, and a lot of advertising. It's not rocket science. It's such a joke--I'm astonished the profession haven't been gobbled up my an app yet.

Well, out of stupidity, or lobbying Gov. Brown signed the bill. If you want to become a broker, and split you commission with the top cheerleader, you need to work two years in order to peddle houses.

It bother me, because I saw the easy money years ago, but draged my feet on finishing my last class, and taking the easy test.

London's Mayfair and other areas are going dark from empty residences and local retail businesses are suffering from lack of walk-in trade, caused by foreign officials laundering billions, stolen from their governments.

How to do something about it:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...

Of course, keeping an eye on the money flows themselves will help.

As an additional interesting (?) link, a (UK-focused) blog featuring rebuttals of common arguments against a land value tax: http://kaalvtn.blogspot.co.uk/p/index.html

Thanks. A very interesting page. Alas, their proposal is too reasonable to ever get traction.

There are actually plenty of good (and legitimate) reasons to buy property in such a way the keeps the owner relatively private.

1. Keep your asset from appearing in a quick asset search. 2. Keep John Q. Public from finding your address via Spokeo, or similar data aggregators. 3. ..?

Same applies to a lease, be it commercial or residential. Most of the cheap background checks used by property managers are cheap because the company (say Experian, etc) receive your information for their product in return. The way around that, is to rent the property through a shell, or to a trust.

LLCs in particular are a very convenient minimal-fuss-required way to get "an entity the system knows how to interface with" spun up abroad. The US economy welcomes investment by foreigners and foreign corporations. The simplest way to do so is to establish an LLC. These LLCs are often established by lawyers. Breathless reports to the contrary, this is actually very common and not in itself indicative of money laundering. This gives you an entity which can trivially (trivially -- fill out a form online, get emailed it in a minute) get a US tax ID issued and be used to fill in any boxes required by a bank, secretary of state, county office, etc etc etc.

Most articles go out of the way to have some boilerplate agreeing with what you just said ("of course there are perfectly legitimate uses" etc), but the fact remains that property bought in this fashion has caused enormous money laundering issues. I wouldn't call the recent articles on this hysterical at all. Furthermore this is requiring confidential reporting to the US financial intelligence unit, not public reporting.

This is a little bit like saying that money has caused enormous money laundering issues.

Heck the tech company I worked for was buying houses and appartments as way to stash value and invest.

So besides selling software they jumped in on the post 2008 crash and started sweeping up real estate. In retrospect it was a good investment I suspect. The value didn't double but probably went up by 30-40% since then.

3 would be to avoid stalkers

Odd,

  In Manhattan, the initiative requires buyers in sales of 
  more than $3 million to be reported; in Miami-Dade 
  County, it requires reporting on sales of more than $1 
  million. In Manhattan, 1,045 residential sales cost more 
  than $3 million in the second half of 2015, worth some 
 $6.5 billion in aggregate, according to PropertyShark, a 
  real estate data company.

So now illicit money laundering in will effectively shift from luxury real estate into the normal real estate markets..?

  In its investigation, The Times found that nearly half of 
  homes nationwide worth at least $5 million are purchased 
  using shell companies. In Manhattan and Los Angeles, the 
  figure is higher.

The point of the new rules is to target current money laundering in the easiest way possible. Trying to inspect all real estate transactions would be incredibly expensive and cumbersome for the state.

It’s possible that folks trying to launder money will switch from doing a single $20M transaction to doing 20 $1M transactions instead, and not change their level of overall activity. At the very least it’ll be a pain in the ass for them, though.

This might not be the ideal policy, but it’s easily explainable if you try to look at it from government officials’ perspective. (So I wouldn’t really call it “odd”.)

>Trying to inspect all real estate transactions would be incredibly expensive and cumbersome for the state.

And the titles companies on whom executing this regulation will fall... It's not like they all have the resources to hunt down shell companies all over the map.

If you think about it economically, then this move and the lower limits are really quite straightforward. Money laundering through property surely has some marginal cost. The goal of the federal government here is to reduce money laundering, because any strategy to totally eliminate it would be irrational, because if the goal is total elimination then you're ignoring all other societal costs. (See: war on drugs.)

This strategy makes it more difficult to launder large amounts of money, and that's their goal. Hypothetically, let's say that the overhead to launder a billion dollars is 20%. If this increases it to 25%, then they've effectively taken 50 million dollars out of illegal circulation. That's a heck of a lot more effective than drug busts.

For clarification, I have no idea what the overhead on money laundering is, but I can't imagine it's cheap to move vast sums of money around off the books.

> nearly half of homes nationwide worth at least $5 million are purchased using shell companies

If one does not need a mortgage, this is actually the recommended way to transact on a high-value property. It makes estate planning easier, it somewhat protects privacy, and when it's time to sell, one simply sells the underlying LLC, which ironically is a much simpler business transaction in most states than selling a piece of real estate.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that you can get a mortgage using a LLC, but you do need to go to a private bank and arrange a custom deal for it.

(I seem to recall Zuckerberg doing this for his Palo Alto home with a variable interest rate loan that started with 2% or so)

For clients of that size it's most likely a variant of a pledged asset line http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/banking_lending/pledged_... at some subsidized rate in order to win their wealth management and private banking business. I mean, if you have significant holdings and if you're okay with borrowing on a floating rate, and if you think you can survive a margin call, Interactive Brokers will lend to you at 0.86% if you park $1m+ of securities with them. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/?f=interest You'd be hard-pressed to find a mortgage on similar terms.

It's a mortgage in layman's terms as there's some principal and interest, but in reality the financial institution won't send an appraiser, there's no mortgage deed issued to the bank, the balance and interest payments are not sliced and diced into securities to be resold.

With that said, mortgages for LLCs are the preferred financing instruments for real estate investors, so they're actually a significant line of business for some banks and yes, they're very doable.

So, even Mark Zuckerberg can't afford a house in the bay area. /sarcasm

Interesting, how come he had to get a loan at all? Is all of his wealth tied up in investments and Facebook stock?

Or is it that the loan is such a low interest rate that it makes more financial sense to keep making money with his cash through investments, say at ~10% return, to offset the loan interest?

Securing low interest loans to buy assets that appreciate in value with relatively low out of pocket money is basically investing on margin. The ROI on just the downpayment portion is many times more than if you'd lock up all the money by paying the entire amount. A game that only the rich can play.

I doubt it's all tied up, as his last recorded sale (in 2013) http://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1548760.htm must have left him with quite a bit of cash. So motives are not perfectly clear.

On a macro level, the government penalizes selling of assets at 23.8% (current long-term capital gains + ACA surcharge) and on the other hand encourages borrowing by keeping the rates low and allowing the interest portion to be deducted as an investment expense, so what's a rational person to do?

You borrow against your stock, of course, so you don't have to realise the capital gain yet get access to the cash. If you're worried about downside protection, you can always buy a put option for the stock you pledged at its current value.

Many publicly traded companies prohibit their employees from buying puts or selling calls on their stock, as it misaligns incentives, similarly to how shorting the stock causes you to benefit from a decline in price.

There are a lot of banks that will make mortgage loans to an LLC. It isn't common in general though because you would end up paying a higher interest rate (~+2%) since your newly formed LLC doesn't have an established credit record and if you were using the home as your residence you wouldn't be able to deduct the mortgage interest from your taxes. Those to costs would far outweigh any privacy benefit an LLC would afford to the average person.

Are you saying this will affect the prices in normal real estate markets?

The biggest problem with the U.S. economy is housing prices. Why not ban foreign investment in U.S. real estate?

This is a big issue in Vancouver, British Columbia.

http://www.theprovince.com/business/Vancouver+critical+money...

They did the exact opposite... A recent bill removed a tax on foreign purchases...

That won't lower the cost of housing (I.e. rent and owner equivalent rent). All it will do is reduce asset prices and investment in real estate.

The real solution is to allow development. Asset prices are high because its mostly illegal to build new housing in coastal cities.

In Manhattan, you can't really do much more development. So what happens is the foreign investments basically buy out a large portion of available apartments and the people have to move elsewhere. To other boroughs mostly.

Sometimes this results in very inefficient transportation/location for actual legitimate companies that operate there and people who live there because of the dead weight real estate.

With better materials and improving construction tech there's always an opportunity to demolish and build higher, latest example being https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

Great example of a building rented out/sold to foreign billionaires who would never actually live there.

As long as their property tax checks arrive on time, the city should do okay.

Sure you can. Lots of Manhattan is only 3-4 stories tall - its just legally impossible to build bigger in many places. (E.g. east village, full of the most entitled activists outside SF.)

Foreign investments in Manhattan are usually rented out and are part of the housing supply.

Close to permanently rented out to foreign/domestic investors not living there.

Also, lots of the medium-height buildings are historic in nature, so demolishing them is not a very good option.

I agree that there could be some further development, but there should be some sort of regulation to avoid ghost-town status.

Had all of the apartments been rented out to actual residents, the picture would have been much better.

Why would an absentee foreigner rent a flat? Unlike buying it, that's not even an investment. It's just throwing money away.

If this is common we should build more and take the money of these stupid foreigners. If we build enough, regulation is unnecessary - why prevent foreigners from giving us their money?

Not sure why they do it myself or how prevalent it is.

Perhaps subletting rent stabilized housing when the price increases further? In this case it wouldn't be much of a problem.

I haven't seen any statistics, just some anecdotal evidence for absentee renters, especially in the past two years.

Regardless, ownership is obviously a bigger problem.

Because in some locations (c.f. London) this makes the asset far more liquid. Having renters requires you to engage a property management company and the presensce of tennants makes it harder to flip the property quickly if you need to get access to your stash of ill-gotten gains.

It is not just stories and anecdote, there are large portions of high-end London real estate sitting empty because foreign buyers often do no want a tennant.

Until you cite some statistics (specifically the residential vacancy rate), you are in fact just repeating stories and anecdotes.

How does eliminating a massive portion of the demand not reduce the price?

> How does eliminating a massive portion of the demand not reduce the price?

It reduces the price of owning a home not living in a home. We have this Chinese real estate money 'problem' in Toronto. It makes it so renting a luxury condo is actually cheaper than buying it and paying mortgage interest + property tax + maintenance.

Effectively rich Chinese people subsidize our cost of living in exchange for having a safe place to park their money :)

is that actually true though? in vancouver, we have a similar phenomenon of Chinese real estate investors, except majority of these investors seem content to buy up properties and then choose not to rent them out even if they're not living there. this takes a lot of rental properties out of the market.

If the cost of home ownership has a major decline by blocking foreign investment, then you would actually be able to buy a home for cheaper than renting, which is normal for markets without so much demand. The exorbitant housing prices have just locked out normal people from ever building some sort of equity.

You can "build equity" by doing things like buying, well, equities. Or fixed income, or any of a variety of other investment vehicles.

The only thing special about real estate investment is the massive government subsidies for it. (E.g., owner-equivalent rents are untaxed, mortgage interest is tax deductible, etc.) The best solution to that problem is simply to eliminate those tax subsidies.

Mortgages also give people access to leverage though, so it's a bit different from other investments most people make.

The major thing that is special about real estate investment is that you can live in it. If I could live inside of Google stock and it would eliminate my need to pay rent, then sure, equities are just as good.

If you invest in equities and get a revenue stream that pays rent, you can "live in it". The only advantage to real estate is that the revenue stream is tax subsidized.

This is fixable in multiple ways; start taxing imputed rent (tolerable) or stop taxing capital income (far better).

Because returns on equities are stable enough for rent. /s

Have you seen what happened since the year started?

If you're thinking of dividends, just for 1k/mo apt you need to have 400k worth of a 3% yielding stock. 400k in a normal us housing market gets you much better than the 1k rent.

> If the cost of home ownership has a major decline by blocking foreign investment, then you would actually be able to buy a home for cheaper than renting, which is normal for markets without so much demand.

But then they would stop building them (or stop building such nice, expensive ones). I'm talking about brand-new 35th floor curtain-glass condos bought straight from the developer.

Whether or not housing prices are a problem really depends on your own financial situation.

couldn't agree more, see e.g. similar restrictions in well-known bastions of socialism singapore, denmark and australia. non-resident investment in manhattan is literally rent-seeking. perhaps if the foreign investment was redirected to regenerating post-industrial cities, or even actual job creation society as a whole would be better off

this kind of legislation is difficult to support/pass because everyone who already owns a house is ostensibly getting richer and richer, and has an easy mechanism to liquidate that wealth. why would they vote against their own interests?

the only people who are hurt are first-time home buyers who basically lack any power or influence in the economy and legal process.

Two good articles - One a long form and one One-pager:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign...

One-pager - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/26/real-estate-goe...

London could benefit from anti-money laundering policies around real-estate transactions as well. There are plenty of stories of corrupt elites parking their money in London real-estate to keep it safe in case the regime gets overturned in their country.

It will be very difficult unless they change the laws. These properties are purchased by the attorneys of corporations owned by other corporations with multiple owners which are other foreign corporations and communicated by a non-owner party. Is it worth it to spend a lot of money tracking the true owners down into foreign countries through this complicated web of corporate companies?

Not sure this will accomplish much. The people sheltering this wealth have attorneys and 'henchmen' who are more than willing to put the assets in their name. Its a massive thing here in Miami Beach (I think half the sales here are all cash and of those, half are from foreign investors)

This is the kind of "bulk collection" they should've been doing in the first place that might have actually busted some crooks. Instead of red flag criteria, they seem to be watching everything else most of the time. (rolls eyes)

Absent from the article is any explanation of how buying real estate is money laundering.

American real estate is a "safe" place to park money. Both as an investment and to get it out of your home country.

The implication is that the cash offers are dirty money. The amount of money coming from China is absurd. They have a major issue with corruption right now. They're even trying to crack down on it. If you were in China and had dirty money you'd want to get it out of the country and somewhere safe. New York, Miami, And also London. Plus lesser cities such as Vancouver and Seattle. The amount of Chinese money flooding Seattle, where I live, is absolutely absurd. It's a major talking point in local discussion.

I would assume that it's a quick way to turn cash into an asset. You buy the house to keep your money safe, then sell the house when you need money.

I'm curious if this could also work in a foreign setting. Like buying a house in another country.

Turning cash into an asset is not money laundering, even if the cash is dirty. Laundering is making it look like you received income from legitimate activity.

Criminals force people under threat of death to sell properties and accept dirty cash for payment. The criminals resell the property for clean money.

Buying real estate itself is not. But buying it with elicit money with intent of obfuscating its trail is.

So instead of buying a $1.1m house in Miami-Dade, I’ll be two at $750k each. Bravo.

Henchpeople, you rank sexist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word)

The meanings of words can change.

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