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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. Institutional investors are setting themselves up to be landed barons that will seek perpetual rent from working people who can no longer afford housing as the supply has shrunk and housing prices skyrocket. Oh and if these institutions fail they get bailed out by govt(they are too big to fail!). Imagine if these 7000 houses were offered to buyers, this would allow so many families opportunities to homeownership, this whole scenario makes me mad as hell and I hope this practice will be banned in the future.

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What would you ban?

No ban, just huge property taxes for non-primary residences.

Doesn't this just trickle down to the renter, who has few alternative housing options?

This guy gets it.

Costs trickle-down... Profits don't.

> Costs trickle-down... Profits don't.

Well, we're talking about costs. That's why I asked.

No. Landlords do not "produce" rooms by taking raw materials and transforming them into goods. In the current market, the rent is determined by how much the marginal renter is able to pay. Increasing the cost to the landlord doesn't magically increase the renter's ability to pay

That's true. It will reduce housing supply and drive costs up, but it will take a while to happen.

Since institutional owners like this make up a tiny percentage of ownership, your solution would have a huge impact on small landlords, which would be passed along to the tenants.

Basically you're asking renters to pay for this behavior...

"A" government[1] could telegraph that major (as major as is necessary) policy changes are coming that will affect SFH investors in a detrimental way, and that it would be in their best interests to prepare accordingly.

If this does not happen, I suspect Mother Nature will eventually intervene, and that usually doesn't go well for anyone.

[1] I do not presume that any arbitrary Western government is actually capable of this in the real world as it relies on many prerequisites, some of them policy, some of them psychological/ethical.

I don't get this thinking. What is the difference between one landlord with 2 properties or 2 landlords each with one property? Why is the latter better than the former?

Where would these two landlords be living? Both would be exactly the same if the landlord doesn't rent.

Does it matter? If you want to achieve maximum dwellings for renting, changing the distribution of units / owners doesn't seem like a practical way to go about it.

You would want to make more units, as many as possible.

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