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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

(Playing devil's advocate, I agree with you personally)

Unless the investor is willing to pay significantly more than a local family, this could deprive your heirs of money that they otherwise would have received.

Especially in a world of decreasing social trust, people are less likely to do something for the benefit of their neighbors or community and more likely to make purely selfish choices for themselves and their family.

"Who's outbidding you by tens of thousands of dollars for that home of your dreams? A hedge fund"

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/who-s-outbiddin...

Research about declining social trust:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-state-of...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/22/key-findi...

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(Playing devil's advocate, without the agreement)

When my wife and I decided to upgrade to a house, we kept our townhouse to use as a rental property. Shortly afterwards, the city council (Seattle) and state government started passing new laws that made things less and less friendly to landlords. You couldn't use certain kinds of data to select tenants, you had to take the first qualified applicant, evictions become much harder to do, etc. At the same time (2020, a time of social unrest), the same politicians pushed for less policing, so the townhouse's neighborhood started to go downhill due to increased crime and homelessness. We acted fast and sold off that rental property, somewhat bitter that a passive income stream had dried up.

If someone had come along on a high horse and lectured at us to take another financial hit for the good of local families because doing an Absolute Good is good for our afterlives, I would have laughed in their face. As it turns out we ended up selling it to a married couple, but if a hedge fund had offered even $1K more I would have taken it.

I suppose this is an example of decreasing social trust, but I'm not rich enough to be able to leave money like that on the table.

It's unlikely that an investor will pay significantly more than a non-investor for a liquid asset. There is certainly some premium, but a large premium would imply something very strange about housing as a market.

> a large premium would imply something very strange about housing as a market.

It is an investment and the actions to protect such an investment is detrimental to using the house as a home. Corporations get representation in government these days so nothing changes to benefit the would-be family home buyer.

In articles like these:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/who-s-outbiddin...

"Who's outbidding you by tens of thousands of dollars for that home of your dreams? A hedge fund"

I am assuming "outbidding you by tens of thousands of dollars" means they are paying higher prices right?

10k+ extra is a nontrivial amount of money for most Americans. That's enough to help offset taxes or pay the real estate agent fees.

I presume a lot of the harm that hedge funds and similar housing investment operations do isn't in the buying and selling of a single house (though there is that); but in the buying and selling of houses in whole markets, artificially impacting the price over the long run.

And barring a catastrophic event like the housing crisis, housing prices never really go __that__ down.

It's like broader inflation. If prices increase by 2% and wages by 1%, after 10 years that's a much broader gulf that is far, far harder to recover from.

Housing is neither liquid nor fungible. There are a limited number of single family homes and existing homeowners do everything in their power to prevent more from being built.

Give it 20 years and we’ll be where Canada, Australia, and the UK are where a house is 10x or more the median yearly salary.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never own a house because of the greed of exisiting homeowners and the cowardice of politicians. It is what it is, and it’s entirely out of my control.

Big investors are closer to the money hose. Money cost less for them since they got the future inflation in their pockets already.

> Unless the investor is willing to pay significantly more than a local family

Institutions tend to not be dumb money as much as retail. But institutions can uniquely be dumb at scale. Every few years someone thinks they solved the housing market with algorithms, and tends to be profitable to do business with them.

In these cases, I don't think the devil needs any more help. They've already got all the money for advertisements, astro-turfing, misinformation, bribery-via-lobbying and convenient sheep doing their work for free and don't need any more.

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