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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

The corporate mega landlords will own a large chunk of all housing in the future, and never release it back to the market.

The idea of houses being owned by people will decline over time until it's only for the mega wealthy - everyone else is a renter.

The companies building up their portfolio of residential housing include Blackrock Capital and JP Morgan - say hello to your new landlords.

The governments could do something about this but they won't.

It's coming to Australia too - the Treasurer Jim Chalmers has met with these corporate mega landlords and he has explicitly stated he is working to "clear away the barriers to investment".

The socialists in Berlin are working to stop the corporate megalandlords - filthy socialists - all they think about is "the people" - no-one consider the needs of Blackrock Capital and JP Morgan...

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The first houses they bought up were in Congress.

Man this is so on-point it hurts.

The corporate mega landlords will own a large chunk of all housing in the future, and never release it back to the market.

According to the source data for the article:

42% OF SINGLE-FAMILY PROPERTIES PURCHASED BY INVESTORS WERE CONVERTED TO RENTALS

45% WERE SOLD BACK (flipped)

So they are in mostly back on the market.

This is where the data from the article is from:

https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2022-i...

In one iteration, 42% are converted to rentals and 45% were "sold back" -- but to whom were they sold back? If they were sold to other investors, they go through another 42% reduction. And so on, for however many iterations there are until it ends up in the hands of someone who actually wants to live there.

> It's coming to Australia too

Is here. Was having an ethics chat with a friend involved with one group and their main point is this makes it better for renters as corp owners give long term stability for a 'home' vs private investors who turnover property.

That was the only point that resonated to me but overall I see this as a real loss for society to take away home ownership from people, or make it so difficult. There something in most peoples core that wants to own their home.

Given the pain points it's inflicting on so many people it's amazing how little political reform there has been other than the first home buyers grant, which was really more about economic stimulation that helping property ownership.

We can make more houses

Corporations will own everything in city's, but don't worry, you can buy a house in the middle of nowhere! Oh, and those corporations are heavily against work from home, by chance.

All US cities are far below the size they would be with building up.

And if corporations own the land?

You can still build it in your mind, probably.

You can always escape to the Metaverse™ to build in Minecraft™ for the low price of 9.99!

And don't forget Bill Gates buying up loads of farmland.

I assume this was said sarcastically because of the wider conspiracy stuff, but I do think this is a problem.

Overconcentration of ownership doesn't benefit society. Not only the extremes of monopolies or oligopolies, but generally shifting away from a single person being able to own and run a business. It feels we are regressing from last centuries significant gains here. Its particularly bad in downstream areas like abattoirs where 4 companies control most of the industry.

Bill Gates might only own 300,000 odd acres now, which is huge but hardly taking over the industry, but its growing and the historical norm is for this to concentrate over time and something we should actively avoid so we dont end up like Scotland or other places where a handful own the majority, which I think will happen if its not actively worked against.

And the "investors" can buy them all up. Look at Vancouver Canada. They built and built and the investors bought and bought. Prices continued to climb.

> take away home ownership from people

The home ownership still belong to the people. It's just that some people are more people than others

>this makes it better for renters as corp owners give long term stability for a 'home'

I can't take this seriously. Given who writes the rules the end result will always be "better long term stability for whoever can afford it" - if the corporate owner things they can get more money then they'll kick out the current renter by raising prices again - like they're doing with the private market now.

It should really be called small-parcel-of-land-plus-a-residential-structure borrowership-with-eventual-ownership.

And it is not all upside. Changing from one "owned" "home" to another has high transaction costs compared to renting. This has all kind bad consequences: people wind up living in the wrong shape/size of house for their family size. It makes it expensive to move to follow economic opportunity.

And then there is all the downside from having such a large portion of your savings tied up in a single, often highly leveraged, asset. Nobody would let you lever up your retirement portfolio 20:1 on any other kind of asset. And home ownership turns otherwise reasonable adults into NIMBYs.

As for the demise of home ownership, the last few decades have seen it fluctuate in a relatively narrow band. See these charts: https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

Look what happened to Berlin over the past 20 years. Same thing: skyrocketing rents.

If the people of the left and the right could set their banker fueled squabbles aside for a while, they could affect laws to, e.g., massively tax institutional home ownership, so it drives them out of the market and brings prices down, and massively tax anything over two homes and anything over a certain square footage per person, etc. all to drive the prices down. Or did that matter, simply not letting that bankers flood the country with foreign nationals that will drive prices ever higher and stoke inflation.

>If the people of the left and the right could set their banker fueled squabbles aside for a while

I’m astonished that you’d think the impediment to your proposals would be the left.

Centrism discourse has run amok.

The great red herring which divides ordinary people on the left and right has always been the "culture wars" - particularly political correctness/DEI/wokeness/whatever the flavor is depending on your decade and ideological leaning.

Elite Democrats, Republicans and members of the capital class are very experienced at fanning the flames of that divide so it continues to distract the working class from a historic multi-decade privatization and consolidation of wealth which these real estate acquisitions are just the next leg of.

America has fallen for that trick hook, line and sinker quite frankly, more so than seemingly any other country on earth

Having been the target of the right's culture wars, I can assure you it certainly does not feel like a "trick" to me and the idea that writing me off as a lost cause will magically fix all of America's problems is frankly disgusting. This reads as little more than a rationalization of bigotry.

Thanks for calling me a bigot, you're definitely elevating the discussion /s

The point isn't that there are no culture war issues that matter - for example I'm pro choice and pretty disturbed by recent right wing activity on that front

It's that the culture war is basically unwinnable and if people fixate on that to the exclusion of economic issues, everyone but Blackrock and Goldman Sachs will end up owning nothing.

Blackrock is laughing its way to the bank every time you start a flame war with some imaginary bigot. Classical Marxists, classical liberals, hell classical conservatives have actually been making this point for years and they've all been called bigots for it

> Thanks for calling me a bigot, you're definitely elevating the discussion /s

If you start a conversation by encouraging people to view my basic civil liberties as a "trick," there is no hope of elevating it. I won't bother dignifying you by responding further.

I would say the trick here is the convincing of the other tribe to see your civil liberties as something to attack. OP has a valid point, but completely undermined it by only describing the blue team's culture war dogma, while leaving out that of the red team (eg religious fundamentalism).

If things continue as they are with the Elites owning everything you won't have any civil liberties. And I think that's part of the person's point. Just look at what's happening in the UK, they've basically outlawed the right to publicly protest.

The difference between Occupy Wall Street to Rainbow Capitalism was pretty striking. Same demographics, very different reaction to the capital class meddling in.

Unfortunately, most of the more politically organised or influential people like things that make property work as an investment. This means they fire up and defeat measures against it. I can't see a way out in Australia.

The right who like house prices going up and hate taxes would just have to have a temporary complete change of heart and direction

Should not default to a defeatist attitude like this. Governments will do something if enough citizens complain and not a minute before.

*if the right citizens complain and in the right ways

Like abortion?

Housing can't be both affordable and an investment, and people voted for "investment."

Land value tax would solve this.

And if most people end up renters, they've killed their middle-class allies against a robust LVT among home owners.

It is the new subscription economy. You will own nothing and be happy.

I mean, at some point, people will be so broke there won't be anything left to take, so there's that.

>Treasurer Jim Chalmers has met with...

Can I get a source on that? As an Australian this affects me.

Here you go.....

https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jim-chalmers-202...

"addressing barriers to investment within the housing sector;"

Read the list of attendees.

"There is a massive opportunity in promoting greater investment in sectors that deliver both strong returns for investors and strong returns for our community."

While there is balance, overall it's more; investors or community, choose one.

This is a misinterpretation, IMHO.

You are assuming from the attendee list that this is about these banks and super funds outright owning the housing asset whereas a more reasonable interpretation is about those organisations funding construction and financing of the assets for private ownership.

You choose to make the most charitable interpretation in favor of the government.

Agreed. It's almost impossible to REALISTICALLY interpret "addressing barriers to investment within the housing sector" in any way that would benefit the working class. What is this "round table" going to propose? That the banks all put in money to build a bunch of houses and then give them away for free?

> That the banks all put in money to build a bunch of houses and then give them away for free?

Housing supply is a massive issue in Australia. This takes investment from developers to buy bulk land, subdivide, permit, build and then sell to families. Mom and pop don't do this...developers do. We need more of it and this is what the government is trying to help.

The government is trying to "grease the wheels" of this process by supporting investment to create more housing supply. I don't particularly support the current federal government but assuming they are plotting a corporate takeover is misguided.

Housing supply is kept artificially low; this a generally-accepted fact.

"Assuming they are plotting a corporate takeover" is hardly misguided. It's an already-well-trod and completely-legal path for banks and developers to take, and they stand to make money hand over fist for it. And if you're saying that no-one in government would support them in this then I have a bridge to sell you.

If anything, assuming they wouldn't do it is misguided.

It's mildly amusing that this is happening basically as a consequence of capitalism and yet there is no shortage of Americans mocking the "slavish" Europeans that live in rent societies. Seems like the US is also turning into a rent society, only the landlords are much less regulated corporations as opposed to very strictly regulated parts of government.

Developers will still build new homes that won’t be owned by these companies.

I work on a lot of condo towers as a high rise window cleaner. I'm seeing new builds get picked up by institutional investors all the time.

There was this story a while back where builders couldn’t find buyers so they sold to Blackrock at a 20% discount so they could get out.

High interest rate policy isn’t fighting inflation it’s just transferring wealth upwards even more.

I would like to know more about being a high rise window cleaner.

Land is not fungible ("location, location, location," as real estate agents often say) and good land is often constrained by zoning and other local regulations. Being able to buy a lot in the middle of nowhere with no access to jobs or other basic necessities is not terribly useful unless you are already independently wealthy. A truly widescale and permanent adoption of WFH might move the needle on this sort of thing, but (checks WSJ) gosh, whaddya know, it turns out Wall Street is fighting tooth and nail against WFH adoption.

Maybe, for that first sale. Then, a housing bubble bursts, those first sales get foreclosed, and the bankers get the houses anyways.

Where I live, they're building mostly *apartments*, not *condos* and not *houses*.

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