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Comment by Originami | Hacker News Reader

Retail mortgages are 6% whilst Blackrock can borrow at 0.75%. Corporations need to banned from owning single-family residential housing.

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Fake news. The government can't even get 30 year money below 3.2% right now.

Blackrock doesnt have any 30 year debt (they have a very debt-light business model). Microsoft has 30 year bonds and theyre trading at around 4.5% right now. But of course, the default rate on AAA corporate debt is much lower than on Joe Schmo's mortgage.

Just for context, Microsoft is the one corporation in the world still has higher bond rating than the US government itself. S&P still has US's bond at AA+, and Fitch has US's bond at AAA with "negative" outlook. While all 4 credit agencies have Microsoft at AAA.

Retail mortgages are 6% for 30 yr fixed. Blackrock isn't getting 30 year money at 0.75%. The US government is paying 3 something for 30 yr money and it's climbing fast.

Blackrock owns 60 billion dollars of real estate in a 36 trillion dollar market. They don't matter.

No one can borrow at 75bps

I think they are talking about the federal funds rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate

I agree, I want the likes of the ilk of the Gates family's hands off single-family residential.

Bill Gates isn't buying SFHs. He's buying all the farmland he can. He's the largest owner of American farmland.

If I had to guess, there’s probably a lot of sfh as well.

Good thing you don't have to and could look it up...

> He's the largest owner of American farmland.

There is 900 million farm acres of farmland in the US. Bill gates owns about 270K acres of farmland. So even though he is the largest private owner of farmland, he owns less than 0.1% of all farmland in the US.

Ref: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-bill-gates-blackrock-7...

I agree with this. Owning apartment buildings are one thing, but buying hundreds of thousands of single family homes and squeezing regular people out is detrimental to the entire country.

Do regular people not live in apartment buildings?

Sure, and they pay a multiple + overhead on top of the underlying mortgage. Some might call this unnecessary /rent seeking/.

Regular people outgrow the 700sqft apartments pretty easily.

One weird trick to own the speculators and make housing affordable for young people: build some more homes in desirable areas. BlackRock is only doing the same thing that the boomer generation has been collectively doing for years; but I guess giving young people a way to access that unearned NIMBY rent defeats the point.

Is this actually a thing? I'm a bit of a map nerd and I look at the King County (i.e. Seattle and surrounding area) parcel maps a lot, and I haven't seen more than one or two single family residential properties that weren't owned by individuals. Do you know of a neighborhood where a lot of houses have been bought up?

Can't remember where I saw it, but IIRC about half the homes sold in the last year in various Atlanta and Dallas suburbs were by corps, REITs, etc. Phoenix and parts of Florida are in a similar boat.

That doesn't mean half the homes are now owned by these corps, just half the homes purchased in last year or two were by corps. But in some cases they've bought whole subdivisions in one shot, so it's not too far from reality depending on the area.

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