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Comment by nothercastle | Hacker News Reader

Real estate developer looking to build build flats for Chinese and Russian investors. Gotta love the grift

Oh no, that'd be awful...but good news, I just looked into it, no China/Russia investors! It's a real estate developer working with the people to get a bunch of units built to ease a historic shortage. Huzzah!

There's a billion dollar price tag being punted around and you think the resulting development is going to be aimed at and priced to reduce a housing supply shortage? Are you by chance on the market to buy a bridge?

Trump tower 2.0 London Edition?

I know I'm supposed to say no, but...yes I do believe it.

I have a proof, too long to be contained within the margins of this page, that when supply goes up, price goes down

Go for it. Econ 100 textbook bs about supply and demand are trivially dismissed by a casual examination of housing and rental prices in the US in gentrified areas. What happens when the real world intrudes on academic platitudes is rather straightforward: pricing for everything goes up and the folks who were struggling get pushed out. Nobody who couldn't afford housing in the market before the shift is served.

I'm more than open to reading anything about that! Literally anything!

Most respectfully and deferentially, I don't think "more things available makes price goes down" is a platitude or textbook or academic thing!

I must confess, the fact this Fat Tony logic and not some theory invented in an academic textbook ivory-tower divorced-from-reality impoverished-intellectual safe haven is why I cannot provide a proof: the note about the margin was an attempt to inject some levity, via a reference to Fermat!

> I'm more than open to reading anything about that! Literally anything!

Great! Start paying attention to real estate and rental prices in areas near "mixed use" development projects and urban multi-story housing construction, literally the projects that are billed by politicians as addressing housing shortages and you'll find my point bore out pretty plainly.

> I don't think "more things available makes price goes down" is a platitude or textbook or academic thing!

It isn't in the context of bulk commodities and raw inputs where producers compete solely on volume. Housing is not a volume market and no incentives exist for developers or property owners to make it one. See also: RealPage sued for enabling market collusion in residential rental rates: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/23/feds-sue-software-c...

Ah okay, you made it up :)

Uh no, I'm watching it play out in realtime in local real estate markets. It's fucking with my retirement plans.

I hate to be rude, but, whether or not your retirement plan is going to plan has nothing to do with whether more housing makes prices go up.

I'm honestly kinda upset you didn't have anything backing up that idea. I genuinely expect better from HN, and genuinely believed that maybe I had missed something at 35, after an econ degree before promoting getting into programming. I wouldn't have given the benefit of the doubt on any other site, and certainly not if you weren't as well spoken as you are.

I can't believe you're throwing out RealPage intros after sneering at me about entry level econ.

Buddy I knew RealPage, intimately, years ago and nothing in the story has anything to say about prices always go up. In fact, the existence of the story requires the opposite

You're arguing from a point of something you read. I'm arguing from a point of a market that I'm heavily invested in and monitoring daily. Get back to me when you've got a couple mil parked in residential real estate in a market where the kinds of development projects you're trying to provide cover for have been commonplace for a decade. I'll wait. Spoiler: you're going to find that both rents and purchase price both skyrocket.

Luxury apartments do reduce the housing shortage. Cashed up boomers can move out of the nice family home they've been living in since the kids left and upgrade/downsize.

Building the high end and having people move up helps with the high cost of construction also.

The general phenomenon is well known to those who study this kind of thing, but yep, building housing of any price helps reduce costs overall:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtering_(housing)

Depends on if people live in it or buy as an investment and leave it vacant or air bb as often happens in London

Not really since those people would otherwise some different existing property to do the same thing with.

I’m not going argue that that basic Econ does not indicate that this should help a bit with housing demand. The question is how much and is it really worth loosing a public institution for.

The marginal utility for the general person of a public market seems higher than that of a couple extra housing units

They're saying "thousands of new homes." If they can build that many homes for a billion dollars, that doesn't sound like its' all luxury housing.

There is no way in hell anything built there will be for normal people. That area is on the doorstep of the City, with excellent connections, it’s like the centre of a compass transport wise. When completed, you can bet it will be 2m+ for a shoebox sized apartment, with yearly fees that would swallow any normal persons salary.

Is there any Russian money going to UK/London anymore? Or any that wasn't frozen/sanctioned that hasn't already left.

I know of trader who left London to work in Dubai to still take his Russian clients business, and apparently all Russian money is going there instead of London.

No Russian money, no sirree. Fortunately there's still plenty of housing designed to appeal to Russian-speaking investors holding passports from Vanuatu, Cyprus or St Kitts and Nevis and fat investment trusts in the Cayman Islands.

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