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Comment by VRay | Hacker News Reader

those hedge funds don't have access to enough money to move the market that much

$2.6 billion is chump change to a medium-sized city with a few hundred thousand residents, much less the US at large

We just need to remove zoning restrictions so that market forces can bring houses back down to being an affordable, depreciating asset.

https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

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> $2.6 billion is chump change

For the entire US yes. For new york city, that's just under ~3% of total sales. Given how fundamentally illiquid residential housing market is, thats more than enough to push prices up/down as the player sees fit.

I bet it's even an even bigger part of the pie if you exclude $10m+ homes. My hunch is that the middle and low end of the market is more attractive because they are easier to rent.

Someone in a related thread here on HN yesterday said that at some recent point in time, US$200M would have bought every piece of residential real estate for sale in Boston (proper). Didn't try to verify if that was true.

I agree that 2.6b is chump change relative to the US housing market. In fact, it’s not a large hedge fund, regardless of what they’re trading. I think the real concern here is if this model proves to be profitable and that 3b increases by several orders of magnitude across a much larger set of firms and funds. I’m not saying that will happen, but that is an alarming potentiality.

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