Scalpers trying to justify scalping. Nope. Please find something better to do with your time.
I don’t think this is a pro-scalper meme, more like an anti real estate “investor” mene
I’m not so sure. It’s just one home that’s been posted. Then again, the nuance of predatory property ‘investing’ isn’t easy to represent in one picture.
In any case, I don’t get the feeling that the meme is saying that they’re as bad as each other, it’s making excuses for scalper exploiting consumers.
No it’s definitely that housing is being treated like scalping when it’s a basic need and the others are not.
That makes it even worse, if it’s comparing buying a house to ripping consumers off.
Cirno doll > house
I feel like North America could fix its housing issue by simply abolishing the single family housing zones
Idk, its not like there’s no housing shourtage/rant gauging in other countries with mor sensible zoning.
Zoning is irrelevant. Perfect zoning laws could mean 10x the houses - and the investors will buy them all up and supercharge property prices all over again.
How many houses are sitting unoccupied like that in your city?
It’s a zoning problem all along. See: Canada, Netherlands, Ireland…
Here is the thing North Americans love single family homes.
Developers in my city are building apartments like mad and filling every single one of them. The common council finally opened up zoning for row housing in the past year.
How would you know, North America is literally missing the opportunity to have new development of things other than single family houses or apartment big buildings, bet you there would be a lot of demand for midrises, row houses, mixed neighborhoods in general
Row houses maybe, but there’s an adversity to condo fees which usually come along with every other source of housing. A lot of people want to feel like they own their home outright, so that once their mortgage is done being paid off, all they need to worry about is the hydro, water, and property taxes. There’s a lot of stories about condo groups doubling condo fees that put others off those types of places.
I feel like every single family home has HOA dues, these days, so that comparison is kinda moot. Whether it’s condo fees, HOA dues, or the local cartel extorting you for protection, you’re gonna get nickel and dimed.
Zoning laws in the US are particularly fucked. This video breaks it down quite nicely, I find.
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No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.
What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.
What are your thoughts on a platform city like the one in Final Fantasy 7?
they could fix the housing crisis by regulating the market.
They could also fix it by deregulating the market.
They could fix it by doing basically random changes to the law, because the law currently is perpetuating the crisis.
Fuck it. Put a pen on the jaw of a goat eating grass, and write the result into law. I think we actually have a shot at improvement this way.
“deregulation” detected. ready the down votes. /s
Seriously though, zoning laws are a big reason why we have the current housing crisis. If given the opportunity, someone or some business will build high density housing. But you can’t with he current implementation of zoning laws. Without that barrier, you would see a lot more high density building projects
Still we do need zoning laws. I don’t think anyone wants a factory or a garbage dump in their back yard. Used correctly zoning also helps limit sprawl.
I think there’s a blind spot on the left for this one. Opening up zoning for higher density is effectively a giveaway to local developers, who are invariably shitbags. It’d be preferable if solutions like banning corporations from owning housing could be enacted.
That’s based on the theory that there are enough houses and flippers and hedge funds are just sitting on them in order to rake it in later as property values are driven up. If that were true, we’d expect to see large vacancy rates in cities. Problem is, we don’t. My city has <4% vacancy for rentals and <1% for home ownership. This seems to be similar to the numbers in many other major cities in North America. If we got rid of every corporation that was sitting on a house unused, the available housing would go up by 4% or so, at most.
We need more housing stock. As it stands, the only way to do that is a giveaway to shitbag developers. They’re the ones that hold the capitol for building more housing.
This could be mitigated by city councils also encouraging/mandating those developers to have unionized staff.
I know this is quite a bit later, but this comment confused me. I do not see how loosening zoning laws that limit density and banning corporations from owning houses are mutually exclusive.These policies can and should work together as part of a bigger urbanist policy. I also don’t see how supporting local developers is that bad of a thing. I’d rather have the money stay in the community and go to a community member than some multinational corporation who owns thousands of homes across the country. Still it isn’t the best. Cooperative housing or need based housing who is better, but realistically those can’t fill up the excess of stock that we need. We will need input from private developers, as well as a big government housing initiative.
We have like 16 million unoccupied homes as of 2023.
How many are in cities people want to live?
Not gonna speculate on that.
De-regulation in general has been an unmitigated disaster.
Yeah, I’m absolutely not saying deregulation is a good idea, just like goat-law. I can see how my comment read though, rewrote a bit to make the cynical undertone a bit more obvious.
I was only pointing out that the current, specific set of laws, is keeping this problem a reality. That it’s not a particularly natural situation to be in.
My apologies, downvote revoked. I mis-read your post.
I’d rather die in a fire.
Do it then
You first, rat warren enjoyer.
Same. I’ve lived in all the basic types of housing: apartment, duplex, house, etc… If I liked being woken up at 3am by some drunk asshole stomping around in the apartment above me or some kid storming in because they don’t understand addresses yet, then I would be doing that already. Maybe other people enjoy that sort of thing? You can have your congested living conditions, but leave me and my single-family zone out of it
I don’t see anyone stopping you
No one is buying new homes and then turning around and selling them. They would lose their ass. They don’t have a fixed price. Builders are selling each and every one for every dollar they can. Investors are typically buying distressed properties that the seller can’t sell and the buyer can’t buy in it’s current state, repairing it and only then reselling it. If they didn’t those sellers would just be stuck in those broken down homes forever.
There are some that do this, but having recently gone through home buying, a lot of them cover up problems with cheap finishes or don’t fix things correctly, then charge a premium
So either all are wrong or all are right. Which is it? Cuz I know people who complain about house flippers, but are totally willing to scalp products like these.
Scalping is wrong, and scalping houses is worse.
No, all is just as bad. Scalpers are preventing people from getting things that they want unless they pay a premium. They’re not contributing anything to society at all.
The difference is want vs need. You can live without a ps5, not so much without housing.
Just an inherent consequence of capitalism. If people are willing to pay much more than the price that was set by the manufacturer, it’s their loss and a business opportunity for third parties.
Yep, so we should abolish Capitalism.
So you will own nothing and be happy?
That’s Capitalism, buddy. I’m advocating for Worker Ownership of their own labor, and collective ownership of the Means of Production. Personal Property is fine, but the end goal of Capitalism is everyone renting everything from a few Capitalists.
Who will produce things without incentive as monetary gain through which they can acquire things? Noone
Do you clean your room?
On a more serious note, Communism is a future ideal, money would still exist until its possible to abolish. There are tons of writings on this that can help elaborate, why do you believe work must be done with monetary inventive?
Edit: oh yea, you’re the landlord everyone called out a while ago, and rather than making any points to defend yourself you just pretended you were superior. Lmao
I clean my room because it gives me a feeling of order.
I do not work because i like work.
I work because i have to so that my children don’tYou like the feeling of order, so you work. Seems like a non-monetary motivation for me.
You also think worker ownership of the Means of Production is Capitalism if it has profit, so I think you’d do better by actually researching what you talk about first.
They tried it and people just sold their shares immediately to some guy buying them all and bought vodka and cigs
All I want nowadays is just equal opportunities to everyone to amass capital which probably would abolish inheritance first and then regulate market to protect from monopolies.
It’s a race and war but at least make the rules fair. Then those who win they win and lose they lose but it was a fair fight
There are systems with private property and property rights, this anything other than capitalism = the most extreme version of communism shit is getting real old and people should be shamed for persisting it’s hyper-bullshittery.
I think the difference with the first 5 is that a manufacturer sets the price, scalpers purchase it by that price and sells it at a much higher one.
The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the “investor” or “scalper” purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone (or did he purchase it from another scalper?)
Yes, the problem is the high prices of houses, but to reduce it we need to either increase supply (encourage building more, perhaps changing zoning laws to allow more homes etc) or reduce demand (increase interest rates (that though make it harder for regular people), restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
I don’t enjoy the whole foreign investor solution, I think it’s a scape goat.
It matters little to me if the person fucking me was born in China or 10 miles from me. Being born in this country doesn’t mean you can screw over the rest of the population.
I’d rather see hard limits on how much property one can own. There is no reason for anyone other than the state to own those huge apartment complexes. Dismantle the land barons class, no one should own enough to house thousands.
I don’t think it is a scape goat. For example, many people from China are not trusting Chinese Yen, they often purchase property purely to hold value and won’t even rent it to others, because it would cause wear and tear. So it is basically a wasted unoccupied unit.
As for your suggestions I totally agree.
Americans do this with property too. If we only regulated foreigners from doing it, that would allow american investors the opportunity to do it more beduase they have less investors to compete with.
If you allow foreigners (keep in mind that those who do this, but only are very rich in their countries, but also are very rich compared to you or me) to purchase property now you not only have demand created by locals but you are adding foreign demand. This all drives the price up.
Even if Americans would do the same thing the prices would be still lower, because now they are out priced.
I think a less heavy-handed way of doing that is, every person can have 1 (one) permanent residence, and all other property you own incurs a much higher property tax. If you’re filthy rich and want a couple of houses, fine, but you’re gonna get taxed for it. But that will stop speculative house buying, more or less. Of course, this will never happen because states race to the bottom to offer low taxes to attract rich people. Another issue is, what if someone wants to live in a house but can’t afford to own it? Renting is the best option for a lot of people. I think that is solvable, but my idea would inevitably take a lot of property off the rental market.
For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They’ll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can “regenerate” the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn’t ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.
For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an “investor” or “developer” who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There’s no risk. There isn’t necessarily any work carried out. There’s no service provided. It’s just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.
It’s the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.
So the idea that “If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it?” or “It’s fair, because they paid above asking price, you could just have bid higher” is wrong because I for one can’t afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.
This is how capital accrues.
The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the “investor” or “scalper” purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone.
That doesn’t mean everyone (or people who needed it) have the ability to purchase it. The down-payment is simply too high that most people who want a house cannot afford it.
This is the same as scalping other goods, they have a unfair advantage in the market, and then they can make back all their money via rent and selling the house. They have nearly no way to lost in this game.
The unfair advantage is what making people angry; they are making money not by labor, insight, or even luck. The only reason these people are becoming richer is because they started rich.
I absolutely agree with your solution BTW, just arguing that people scalping houses are very much brain-dead scalpers. Many of them probably don’t even care about the basic human right to shelter.
restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
Agreed, we should be doing all of those things. Corporations should not be able to own any kind of housing at all, and multi unit buildings should be under non-profit co-ops.
And to penalize unoccupied housing, we should have a georgist taxation system.
The only time it makes sense for me for a corporation to own a residence is if they have a need to put up their own employees in that area regularly, or if I needed a manager living on site (like some storage facilities have). Corporations should not make their money renting or buying/selling single family homes.
I don’t think there are enough such edge cases for it to make sense for it to be legal.
If a corp needs an employee to be that close, then they should hire local, and/or rotate staff.
At a bare minimum, I agree, no corp should profit off of housing.
I’m not sure I’d agree that corporate ownership is necessarily bad If you want to rent an apartment because you don’t want to buy into a co-op then how do you go about this? Someone needs to own the apartment to rent to you Personally I don’t mind if that initial investment comes from a person or a corporation
Could you rent from the co-op at cost without buying into it?
Who are you paying? Other owners of the apartment? So they put in extra up front so they can rent to you? If so do you get to pay back their initial investment over time? If it’s non profit does that mean they can’t take anything in excess of what they paid or do they get payed x amount over the top?
I’m fine with co-ops generally but when it comes to rentals I just don’t see how you’d make a “not for profit” rental But I mean if someone wants to set one up and prove me wrong that’d be cool. In theory nothing is stopping them
Land. Value. Tax.
Value.
Tax.
It’s wild that you don’t see how exploitable such a tax would be. Specifically, it would make gentrification occur more easily and quickly.
If a developer became interested in rebuilding a poor neighborhood, their interest alone would dramatically raise the land value of the area. The now untenable tax burden would force the current residents to move out, and because the developer would be the only one interested in buying, the developer has nearly complete control over the sale price.
Developer is not controlling the price, they’re the highest bidder. It seems like a positive anyway - existing owners can sell at a high rate, government can get more tax, more tax can fund more support for the poor
The current owner can no longer afford the taxes and is forced to sell whether or not they want to. The developer can position themselves as the “highest bidder” by an extremely small margin over the property’s historical value, denying the current owner the windfall from the recent spike in land value. Despite the increased land value, no one else will be interested in purchasing the property at this valuation until the developer’s project is complete, as the project itself is the cause for the spike.
This is effectively eminent domain for private developers. If you’re a homeowner and you’ve been paying your property taxes just fine for the past decade on a $40,000/year salary, you shouldn’t suddenly become unable to afford to live there because someone said you live in a “hot area” or whatever.
Pardon, I don’t get this - “The developer can position themselves as the “highest bidder” by an extremely small margin over the property’s historical value, denying the current owner the windfall from the recent removede in land value.” - Wouldn’t ask/bid and transaction value determine the land value? Why does the land value tax increase a lot if the best offered purchase value will be only slightly higher than historical?
LVT is already a thing in a bunch of places… How come we haven’t seen these dramatic gentrifications happen?
The home investor pays pretty harsh taxes for flipping a house less than a year. Unless the scalper actually puts their own money into it to improve the home, the taxes alone would make the investment bad.
Basically there is usually some sort of value add an investor does to maximize profits.
A scalper too. 🤌
yeah someone needs to stop the Chinese from buying up residential property everywhere
Over here foreign investors are banned from buying property, they can only build property. Unless you send your kid to uni here, then it’s all fine apparently
And if we in the US tried banning foreign investors buying houses we’d be called racists. It needs to be done. I’m tired on not being able to afford anything where I live
Oh don’t worry we still can’t afford anything. Median house prices are over a million dollars AUD and in terrible condition.
Yes, we should ban foreign investors. Especially the US companies that want to profit from our housing scarcity.
If only there were some sort of governing body that could regulate things like that…
No one should be able to, regardless of where they come from. China is a scapegoat.
Not a scapegoat but the current largest offender.
Domestic corporations outpace them by quite a bit. Even if you only look at foreigners, China only accounts for 13% with Mexico at 11% and Canada at 10%.
We should aim to ban everyone from doing this. If no one, domestic or foreign, can abuse of the housing industry, the problem goes away.
If only China is banned from doing so, the vacuum gets filled in the space of a day and the problem persists.
Op has right idea but terrible phrasing. Sounds racist (well, xenophobic) and I actually started trying to type a (tongue-in-cheek) racist response, but I couldn’t get the tongue-and-cheekiness strong enough to be clear I was mocking it.
I don’t know why this is controversial. It’s just a fact at this point.
It’s not scalping if you bought them on the secondary market, it’s hoarding.
They’re all investments. Most of these products are specifically setup by artificial over demand and under production to be profitable, basically exploiting the fact that there are 8 BILLION humans and a small group have most of the money.
Shit like this wouldn’t work in a stable global economic system that wasn’t headed for collapse on a bullet train
Hardly the same comparison. People buy houses when there isn’t demand and sell when there is.
No demand for places to live? Get a grip.
When was the last time there wasn’t housing demand?
Also big companies are now owning a huge part of the overall houses.
You could find out when there wasn’t housing demand simply by looking house prices in an area over time. If it flattens or falls in an area, then demand has fallen. And instead of sobbing that people richer than you can afford to buy a particular house at the market rate, you should instead be lobbying state & city governments to change the absurd building codes that prevent more affordable urban housing to be built that the suburban sprawl that afflicts most US cities.
Based
My opinions nobody asked for:
I really don’t care if people want to scalp non-essential goods tbh. It sucks but my life intersects with those items so seldom that it doesn’t impact me. I make a slight exception for things like electronics (i.e. GPUs a few years ago) because some peoples’ livelihoods are directly tied to being able to access those goods.
If you try to flip houses for profit, you’re neither a scalper nor an investor. You’re a sociopath at best and a murderer at worst
That’s today’s Lemmy Moment of the day.
Besides, don’t house flippers generally renovate the house, and generally make it more presentable?
See my other comment about positive-feedback loops. The House Flipping trend of the late 2000s was never sustainable.
On the matter of more presentable, I disagree strongly. Late-Stage Professional House Flippers are concerned with nothing but profit. The quality, fit, and finish of their renovations are tastelessly bad. In almost every case, I refuse to believe that House flippers do a better job cosmetically than if the home had sold to people who would be living there who would then be able to work with a contractor to fix up the house into exactly what they want.
Source: I’ve spent more hundreds of hours than I can count doing sub work for house flippers. There’s nothing defensible about what they do.
Source: I’ve spent more hundreds of hours than I can count doing sub work for house flippers. There’s nothing defensible about what they do.
Clearly there is something defensible… You did the hundreds of hours of work. And you can’t complain about fit and finish if you were the one doing the work.
I have to disagree with the first part, the principal applies unilaterally. Second part, you’re bang on.
Perhaps we have a different definition of “flip” but the one familiar with is taking a home in bad shape then fixing it (usually yourself, because hiring a contractor would cost more than the profit). I don’t flip myself, but I don’t see this as a negative. Someone put effort to improve the house and gets profit from it (yes, there’s an issue that they might use the cheapest materials, because they won’t live there and just want to make it look good, but that’s a different issue).
The biggest issue in driving prices up is low supply and high demand.
We should change zoning laws to allow building more houses and also place restrictions on houses purchased by corporations and international investors. Oh yeah, Airbnb is another one that drives prices up.
The issue with flipping is that they draw from the same pool of housing as the rest of the people. If a party is interested in purchasing a house to live in and along comes a flipper and purchases it instead, the flipper will add on a profit for his service, that nobody asked for.
Presumably, the party that wanted to live in had already seen the state of the house and was prepared to pay for fixes. Let’s say both them and the flipper would use the cheapest materials and labour possible, levelling out the equation. The profit for the flipper has to come from somewhere then - something extra added beyond the labour and material cost - something somebody who would live there would not have to pay in normal circumstances. They do DIY to save on labour? Great - they can be contractors then, not flippers.
This means to me that flipper not only does not add any value to the house, but inflicts extra costs upon any good faith buyers. Add to that the fact that tastes vary greatly between people and they might actually do some damage by decorating or remodelling in a style thay may not appeal to everyone, or in a bland style. All of it could have been avoided if the flipper just fecked off. House flippers are like the people rushing to pump your gas for you before you get out of the car and then expecting a tip.
I mean if you manage to make money flipping houses, go for it. But I don’t know how in the hell that’s possible in this market.
