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Comment by nielsbot | Hacker News Reader

Depends on how many tenants there are: is is a buyers' or sellers' market?

Their point is that an increased housing supply should shift it to a buyer's market - it's not just how many tenants there are but how many housing units vs how many tennants.

Whether it's a buyer or seller's market depends on supply!

If the wealthy buy up existing limited housing supply and there are many tenants looking for housing, then they can continue to raise rents, no?

The premise here is investors that just continually buy up all the supply, even as supply continues to increase, in the hopes that some day housing, the single largest asset class in the United States, will reach the limit of all possible supply? You don't feel like this is "spherical cow" calculating? The amount of investor-owned housing in most metro markets is a rounding error, and the amount of vacant investor-owned housing is smaller than that.

The logic you're using here depends on deliberate vacancy; as soon as you concede that investors let out properties, you force them to compete in the market for housing with all the other supply.

Yeah except it almost always gravitates to a cartel, almost always, because that is how people work, even when piloting corporate machines.

I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing you haven't been month to month rent in a while..

EDIT: you seemed to have tried to redirect the question to this "always buy up more land as an appreciating asset", when both can be true. "Buying that land is an appreciating asset (we haven't made much more I'm aware)" and that "forming an asymmetrical power relationship with the renters improves owners life" are mutually beneficial activities

I'm trying to track this argument through this thread but I feel like something has gotten lost here, is there someone arguing against increasing the housing supply? Like, did someone upthread say something like "no, I think we should not build more houses"?

Or is the argument that merely building more houses isn't sufficient?

(Also presumably you could build an infinite amount of houses, but the land itself is somewhat of a fixed supply...)

> is there someone arguing against increasing the housing supply?

Yes. The central thesis of the blog post is that increasing the housing supply solves the housing price issues.

And other people in this thread are going: "Uhh, well actually, have you considered that this is the fault of wealthy investors, and/or collusion or something"?

Anything to distract from the extremely simply and obvious idea that building more housing causes prices to fall.

Housing returns have constantly lagged behind equities in the US. In the long run it’s almost always preferable to hold stocks as most of your investments in the US.

Again, that means the answer is to stop limiting how much housing is built.

If - hypothetically - I had a ton of money and buying another house or two or fifteen wasn't a big deal, wouldn't there be a clear-ish signal that I should stop my demand for more housing lest too much supply screw with my income? I would also have an incentive to deploy some of my resources/capital to making sure that the supply of housing is juuuuuuust right for my extractive needs.

Thats what I'm trying to figure out myself, which bank is going to give out loans on a depreciating asset. Funding will dry up as supply increases.

It is all fine as long as repayments on principal are faster than depreciation. Might mean larger down payments or shorter durations. As long as you can reasonably expect collateral to stay above principal math does work out in my mind.

Car loans have been a thing. And they attach to depreciating asset.

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