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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Second homes tend to be in vacation locations, not where people are trying to buy their primary residence.

People aren't buying two homes in the same city alternate between them while keeping young homeowners out.

Yes they are. I know such people. Usually the second/third/fourth homes get rented out as AirBnBs.

Anecdotally, of the many people I know who own second homes, ~80% or more are not rented out when the owner is not there. In at least half of the cases Airbnb is expressed prohibited by their community/municipality

> Second homes tend to be in vacation locations

> AirBnBs

It's unfortunate that sometimes vacation destinations also can be places where lots of people want to live but the PP was not wrong.

I stand to inherit from such people. They own five homes, are building a sixth, and have plans for 1-2 more at least. 4 are rentals, 1 is a charity to my Uncle who is mentally unwell and unable to provide his own living. They don't think they have that much money.

It's all relative, but supposedly the top 1% had $11M in the US in 2022 (e.g., via https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...). That means, 5 averagely priced houses do not put you in the top 1%, however, 1 big mansion in a nice area could.

$11M is net worth, not all of which needs to be held in residential real estate. I would expect a lot of people in that ballpark of net worth to probably "only" have a few million sunk into real property. The rest would likely be in securities.

Also consider that someone with 5 houses may not even have all that much of their net worth in the houses; the could largely be financed.

Exactly, and what’s the occupancy rate for those Airbnb? 80%, 50% 20%? I knew one family that could make more an Airbnb in a week than they could renting it for two months.

We are incentivized by our greed nothing else.

Perhaps, but so what? Acting morally superior doesn't fix that. You don't change people's habits or desires. You either change the incentives (good luck with that in this particular case), or you... build more housing and make it not a problem that people own multiple homes.

Shame used to work wonders to get people to change their behavior. It’s still does. That’s the thing about morals, included with it is shame.

Good luck with counting on people to have shame and a moral compass (esp the wealthy). There's a ton of bigots on X (Twitter) who just love beating their chest showing they're a bigger biggot than the next. It's the generation of F* you, I've got mine, and not all of us are like that, but too many definitely are.

>It's the generation of F* you, I've got mine

Which generation exactly?

All of them.

AirBnBs are hotels. Perhaps they should be regulated as such?

That is exactly what’s happening in many places. A new condo development went up near me, and over 80% of units were immediately purchased by investors. Not giant corporations, but local individuals buying for mainly AirBnB use.

Untrue - it often takes the form of: somebody bought a townhome in the city 20 years ago, they use the appreciation to buy a house in the suburbs, they move and keep the city home and rent it out.

> Untrue - it often takes the form of, somebody bought a townhome in the city 20 years ago, they use the appreciation to buy a house in the suburbs, they move and keep the city home and rent it out.

Renting a home out is still productive.

Keeping it empty is not. I was pointing out that people aren't buying two homes in the same city to keep one empty.

Renting a home out is not productive. It’s financial capitalism. Is rentier capitalism. There’s no product being made.

It's a reasonable thing to predict quanatatively. If second homeownership was not legally possible, how much would it affect home ownership rates? (given all other things equal)

Just about every vacation destination in the world is a place where other people are trying to live. Pretending otherwise is bizarre.

Eh.. there are housing shortages in almost every one of the locations where people buy second homes too. All of the ski towns, all of the beach towns, tons of Southern warm-climate cities like Sedona and Las Cruces.

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