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Comment by not_wyoming | Hacker News Reader

> Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation

This statement and citation fail to account for the impact of AirBnB and other STR market-makers on the housing market.

I strongly suspect a big part of housing price increases is the "small business" equivalent of institutional investors - someone buys 1-2 units that they do not plan to occupy and rent them as STRs. Similarly, vacation homes (aka homes that will go unused for the vast majority of the time) are now much, much more affordable if you can book a couple rentals a month to supplement a mortgage.

I'm *sure* AirBnb has some fascinating data on this, but I don't expect to ever see it in the public eye without government intervention (much as we'll likely never see Meta's studies on teen users' mental health).

tl;dr - but what about her airbnbs

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> I strongly suspect a big part of housing price increases is the "small business" equivalent of institutional investors - someone buys 1-2 units that they do not plan to occupy and rent them as STRs.

This does not pass the smell test to me. Small businesses somehow are more inventivized to do this than institutional investors? Because the margins are not sufficient to attract the large businesses?? That needs evidence.

In general, small landlords don't make sense to me as something to ban.

Someone buys a two flat, lives in one and rents the other to help pay for the mortgage. That has classically been ok. You're only objecting to the short term ones?

> Small businesses somehow are more inventivized to do this than institutional investors? Because the margins are not sufficient to attract the large businesses?

Yes. When Joe is buying a couple homes, he doesn't have to pay for HR, business dev, legal, compliance, etc etc. And -

> That needs evidence.

Fair enough! I care about this topic, but not enough about this thread to make a carefully cited case here (no offense to you, friend). I'm sharing from anecdotes and personal (albeit unscientific) research.

> Someone buys a two flat, lives in one and rents the other to help pay for the mortgage. That has classically been ok. You're only objecting to the short term ones?

Yep, and I've come around on this. I used to think landlord = bad (in college, we're all young and naive at some point), but I've come around to the real economic need for an LTR market. I'm thinking of cases where an individual buys up a handful of properties to use as STRs, removing them from the LTR market (which reduces supply which increases rates of the remaining units). I have seen this happen in my area in real time but I recognize that it is scientifically unsound to extrapolate that to other areas.

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