this makes me realize I need to get back up in the demo scene as well dust off my ol' TI-99 with speech and crush some Parsec!
318 karma · joined September 12, 2014
Their good investment allows them to sell that property at a profit, rent it for cash flow, or just sit on it. It's still their choice. Just like in the financial crisis, companies were hoarding cash due to uncertainty but because interest rates were zero-negative this encouraged spending and propped up the economy until more material improvements could be achieved. It's basic economics at the end of the day.
And you're right... as owners now we don't care and only benefit from the absentee neighbors. That's a major part of the problem. Now that we're invested, we are naturally opposed to anything that would untether our tax rates. If our neighbors (who mostly bought in the 80s/90s) were paying tax on the current valuations they would be encouraged to either sell or rent thus creating more inventory and helping bring prices toward equilibrium.
http://sftreasurer.org/online-property-tax-payment-faq#taxam...
Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago.
We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are absentee owners. They're rich enough and the cost to maintain is so low that they don't even need or want to rent those units out. We've seen our neighbors only 2-3 times in past 2 years... but if you look at the property tax bills of folks who bought 10-20+ years ago they are minuscule and are only adjusted upon sale of the property. In our case, we're paying easily 4x what the previous owners were.
We moved from DC couple years back which is also very expensive but their tax valuations are re-assessed on a regular basis so you don't have this huge disparity in what the rich old people are paying in prop tax vs the young not quite rich people are.
If values and property taxes were reassessed every 3 years or so this would put more pressure on these absentee owners to either sell or rent their units thus increasing existing inventory as well as adding to the city's coffers.
So, no surprise, same thing is going on here. It's much less about security than it is about deriving value from the solved image matches.