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Once you own all housing, what's to stop you from increasing rents?

The move BlackRock will do, based on their history, is to incentivize increases in adjacencies to drive value. What I mean by that is that they will, for example, encourage new office complexes in locations favorable to their new rental domains. Think SF bay area’s natural and warped logic locating massive complexes on the peninsula or ST instead of Fremont/San Jose.

Right, but the greater the share of the market you own, the less you have to invest in making your offering more attractive, and the more you can start simply increasing rents.

They along with others are trying to build a monopoly/oligopoly in housing. Naturally we would expect regulations against this, but the fact that it's going this far is a bad sign.

Presumably your own desire to maximize revenue. If you charge a rent that your tenant can't afford, then you get nothing.

If you own all options and the renter needs to have some sort of housing, they'll pay anyway. The end result is that the owner will start collecting a larger percent of the renter's earnings.

I'd give up housing before food. There's a limit to how high that percentage can be.

The point is that landlords will be able to suck up the income that you spend on non-essentials and luxuries.

Only when demand exceeds supply and people have that extra income.

Edit: which is common in desirable places with lots of well paying jobs.

There are cheap places to rent and buy in the fly over states but not as much opportunity, hence the price

> I'd give up housing before food.

Lack of food can be fixed in a day. Lack of housing can be impossible to overcome ever.

I don't get this.

Both things could be fixed in a day. Also, both of them could be impossible to overcome ever. What's the distinction you're trying to draw. If it comes down to an acute situation where I had to choose, I (and most I think) would choose to eat. I understand in the real world, there probably wouldn't be such a clear choice.

When you make housing too expensive, people just get up and move. People are not surfs and are not trapped or stuck living in a house they can't afford. It might not happen overnight but populations do migrate due to housing costing too much.

> When you make housing too expensive, people just get up and move.

Not when all the jobs in that household are here.

> People are not surfs and are not trapped or stuck living in a house they can't afford.

They are when all the jobs in that household are here.

> It might not happen overnight but populations do migrate due to housing costing too much.

People who are facing homelessness this year aren't thinking about market corrections that are decades away.

Regulatory backlash.

We're waiting

Rent control has been instituted or strengthened as a response to rising rents in cities across the country.

Maybe. I'm skeptical it's enough though. Clearly, the intention is to see how much they can get away with as monopolists.

"In 2016, with the real-estate market heating up in metropolitan areas across the country, single-family rental companies also started pushing the limits of how much they could raise rent every year. American Homes 4 Rent raised rents by 11 percent between 2016 and 2018; the average rents in the top 30 markets in the country increased by just 6 percent over the same time, according to Zillow. American Homes 4 Rent owned 70 percent more properties in the first nine months of 2018 than in the same period in 2014, but it collected 150 percent more rent. “It’s up to us to educate tenants in a new way that there will be annual rental rate increases,” David Singelyn, the CEO of American Homes 4 Rent, said at an investor’s forum in 2017. “This has been a very passively managed industry for 30, 40 years, up until the institutional players came in.” [1]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...

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