Hacker News Reader

From my cursory analysis, "# of new housing units authorized" is by far the strongest predictor of rent & home values decreasing: https://i.imgur.com/BMsPrKY.png (r^2 = 0.47, P-value 0.000)

Nothing else ("% of housing owned by investors"?) is even close.

edit: Yes, obviously I included a time lag (3 years).

[1] https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...

[2] eg, https://www.zillow.com/home-values/10221/austin-tx/#/

View on HN

That's surprising to me, given the lag time between authorization and completion, and the dynamic of people moving into a given area vs moving out.

Hypothesis: investors rent out their investment housing (to make a profit) so it doesn't really reduce housing supply, it just shifts supply from owned to rented.

It reduces supply for people who exclusively want to own. I'm not going to tell people what is the better financial decision for them, but there is a segment of society that wants to own a home regardless of whether renting is more financially beneficial.

Yeah, and it will depend a lot on the regulatory structure in the local environment, plus national things like interest rates. With prop 13 locking in below-market taxes, you'd have to be crazy to sell property in CA. With a different structure, you'd have to be crazy to keep it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com