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Comment by benlivengood | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full transparency of real estate ownership and transactions. My fear is that otherwise we'll revert to de facto feudalism where the wealthiest entities can acquire and lease out virtually all real property.

[0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11957208/near-1-billion-land-purch...

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It’s not just private citizens that have benefitted from this. Los Angeles was able to snag land key to its early water supply due to lack of transparency around land acquisition.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-history-telle...

You are very wrong on your analysis of the travis afb land purchase. You would be correct if someone could easily get into their entire land position they need for their project all at once but it never happens that way, you are always legging into positions and run the risk of massive extortion if what you are doing is known because holdouts can capture excess payouts due to their monopoly power. Secrecy is required to get a deal done otherwise no deals get done due to landowner greed.

> holdouts can capture excess payouts

Isn't that capitalism working as intended? If you have a desirable asset then why shouldn't you charge more for it?

It is, and so is secrecy. Capitalism does not require publishing every business dealing. Capitalism is not just competition between a buyer and a seller, it is also between buyers and between sellers. Sellers with better access to info win, but access to info is not a property of capitalism.

That being said, while capitalism should definitely be regulated, I actually don’t think land ownership needs to be public bc I don’t think it will stop feudalism. I can buy however much land I want whether you know it or not.

No, that is exercising market power and it causes dead weight loss (basically the worst thing that can happen in economics). When you have a project that needs x amount of land the project is a go as long as the cost of everything is less than the present value of the expected profits. The spread between the cost and the expected payout should be whittled away to a small number in an efficient market. In an inefficient market with market power that is whittled away to potentially zero by holdouts abusing their position to get extra payout far in advance of the value of their land. The efficient market results in lower end costs and more stuff for us all, which is pretty much always a benefit to society. The inefficient market costs us output and makes us all worse off.

Since you are legging into the real estate the secrecy pretty much always gets you closer to the efficient outcome rather then transparency because the efficient outcome has the land purchased at the current value, not the value based on market power abuse from knowing what the future private development plan for the land is.

The buyer is the one giving the market power to the seller. If the buyer did not have interest in the land and did not buy the surrounding land, then the seller would not have power. It is not the sellers fault if the buyers project fails because they couldn't budget for the "inefficient market" they themselves created. Calling this "abuse" is sour grapes.

Wow, that is a very tortured re-imagining of reality. The buyer in this case needs a certain amount of land at a certain price to make their project make sense. If that amount of land is larger than the average size of land for sale, then they have to leg into the total land purchase by buying chunks of land over time until they have amalgamated their total land requirement. It is entirely the seller's fault because they are the ones demanding a very large markup on the previous fair market value of their land because they know the buyer has already spent millions to hundreds of millions and will potentially lose their shirt if the project fails. This is the textbook definition of market power abuse. The end result of which is an artificial limitation on projects that need more than the average amount of land for sale, less output from society and all of us being poorer for it. Also, you can't really budget for this kind of abuse because the seller is taking into account what they think you budgeted and trying to capture all of it. It's a death spiral for large projects playing that game and it's why some decent secrecy is needed in situations like these. There is no situation where a land owner getting a large payout for holding out is a good thing for society.

The price of a good is not a constant. It doesn't matter whether it's land, gold, stocks, rent, or trading cards. Prices change. Buyers are never entitled to the "previous fair market value" of anything.

The simple answer is that acquiring large tracts of land isn't tractable in established areas. It requires forceful taking of some parcels or extravagant expense. Eminent domain allows the government to accomplish infrastructure projects at a (somewhat) reasonable cost but there's no expectation that private entities can achieve the same thing.

Why should real estate have MORE stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than stock ownership?

It shouldn’t, but real estate disclosure isn’t the problem there.

This is an argument to make stock ownership more public, not to make real estate ownership less public.

Why should stock ownership have LESS stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than real estate?

Funny how often we allow shitty practices in one area because we already allow shittier practices in another. Why not have good policies instead of accepting bullshit all the time?

Is your argument that everyone's assets should be public information? How do you square this with people interested in blackmail, or abusive families?

What do you think about Norway's public salary record?

Significant stock ownership is pretty public through 8k forms. The SEC doesn't require reporting every trade of a few million dollars because it generally doesn't make a difference anyway. And you CAN access time and sales data in most brokerage platforms to see the size of many of those trades. The big exception there being those done on dark pools.

And while perhaps you could argue against dark pools, most would agree that illiquidity is a bad thing in markets. Dark pools do a good job of addressing this allowing for large positions to be massaged into a market they'd otherwise disrupt fairly heavily.

Why should disclosure be forced upon the vast majority of people at significant harm when you can enforce disclosure only if you own more than X properties or some % of an area?

What is the significant harm that is being forced on vast numbers by open records? I could see harm to a small number of people but for the true “vast” number, there is no impact.

The amount of spam and scam that starts heading your way when you purchase a house is insane.

Most of that drops off after the first year and then you just get the usual volume of spam. I keep a recycling bin near the front door for fast triage. Many days it all goes into the bin.

Maybe we should fix that rather than the disclosures?

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