My mother was actually thinking about selling my grandparents house to them.
I’m not sure if I changed her mind, but I straight up told her the second she mentioned them that I would burn the house down before the sale went through and would be chilling in a cell with a smile on my face for it.
She decided not to sell to a company.
Does that make me unhinged? Maybe. But that’s one less house going to a rental company and one more family getting a house they’ll live in.
You did the right thing. They would have just used it as currency anyways.
lacht in Friedrich Merz
What did he do again?
Rente “nur noch als Basisabsicherung” und dann an der Börse zocken mit unseren Rentengeldern, dann kann sich Blackrock schön die Taschen voll machen (sein ehemaliger Arbeitgeber). Ansonsten noch der Ausverkauf Deutschland’s, Kaputtstreichen der Krankenversicherung, das ständigen Hetzen gegen die eigene Bevölkerung usw usf
this whole thing just doesn’t add up in my head.
people will bash blackrock for owning houses but really, what is actually happening here?
governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?
You can’t ban corporate houses if there’s no alternative. There needs to be an alternative first, otherwise you’re just creating a vacuum, and as the proverb goes, a vacuum always sucks.
Blackrock isn’t a housing company or developer, it’s an investment group. What’s happening here is that a group that hires a lot of very smart people to manipulate market values has found an easy mark in housing.
The housing shortage is fueled by artificially high prices, not square footage or bedrooms. That’s what you’re missing.
so what you’re saying is that market manipulation (= monopolies) is the problem, not companies owning houses?
I’m saying that companies owning houses is the market manipulation, neighbor.
How do you type so much while deep throating corpo dick? Do you just have absolutely no gag reflex? How does one learn this skill?
You realize ownership isnt creation, right? I genuinely have to ask here.
The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not. Even if every market participant were an individual, that (presumably not overly wealthy) single mother of four is still going to get out-competed.
The only actual solution is to increase supply, which means abolishing the wealthy-favoring laws that make it illegal to build (i.e. the laws mandating things like single-family houses and minimum parking requirements).
Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
I’m sure when we build more properties Blackrock won’t continue to buy them as well as the 1/3 they already own in my city. Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?
The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not.
Where do middle men live in this equation? What about lenders, administrators, and housing developers?
The only actual solution is to increase supply
Ten houses are on the market. These houses range from $250k to $5M in listed price.
I have $20k for a down payment and $200k in borrowing power.
You have $30k for a down payment and $300k in borrowing power.
Berkshire Hathaway has $373.31 Billion for down payments and functionally unlimited borrowing power.
How many extra houses need to be built before you or I can outbid BH for a home?
Let’s find out!
Get cracking, scout!
Doesn’t matter, because even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated from the bidding, when a dozen buyers with $200k or $300k in buying power are in the market and only one house is for sale because it’s literally illegal for more to be built, only one of you is going to be able to get the house!
I really don’t get your angle. Let’s say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there’s an immediate drop in demand, so the current supply satisfies more individuals. Why are you arguing against this?
So suddenly the law of supply and demand conveniently no longer applies? By removing demand from the market, we’re not lowering prices?
even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated
How many properties is BH sitting on unsold? How many are going to open up with the death of the Boomer homeowner generation?
Between 13.1 million and 14.6 million Boomers are projected to “exit homeownership” between 2026 and 2036. Who will own those homes when they are gone?
it’s literally illegal for more to be built
Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes
We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus. What we lack is jobs paying at the going mortgage rate
Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes
Just look at any zoning map. It’s all the (usually) yellow parts, i.e. the single-family-zoned areas, which make up the vast bulk of most cities’ residential land area.
We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus.
Sure, in the exurbs nobody actually wants to live in!
It’s all the (usually) yellow parts, i.e. the single-family-zoned areas,
Are you claiming that you can’t build homes in a residential neighborhood?
in the exurbs nobody actually wants to live in!
The exurbs were very popular during COVID work from home
There are enough empty houses in the US to give FOUR to every unhoused person. It is NOT a supply issue.
Supply is a problem and I agree about existing density-blocking laws. However this is not an either/or situation. Market effects on pricing are aggregate, not annectdotal. Taking private equity out of the market would certainly lower demand. Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.
And plenty of units are converted rentals that leverage the borrowing power of the owner to upcharge the tenant.
Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.
do you have data?
The effect of zoning laws dwarfs the effect of private equity, to the point that focusing on the latter is absolutely just making a scapegoat to avoid fixing the actual problem.
People just love to blame private equity because they want to eat their cake and have it too (own a single-family house in the middle of a city, for a price they can afford) and can’t bear to face the reality that that is fundamentally impossible as a matter of geometry.
It’s real fucking simple, people: if 10 families want to live in the same acre of land, they don’t all get to each own a single-family house on a one-acre lot! One of them gets to (for a huge price), and the rest get physically displaced. The only way for something else to happen is for the law to change so that more housing units can be built on that acre, but the spatially-inevitable consequence of that is that each family doesn’t get their own house with a 1-acre yard.
You fundamentally cannot have it both ways, but people don’t want to accept that so they blame private equity instead.
I’m not defending private equity in the slightest, mind you! By all means, fucking murder them all if you want; IDGAF. I’m just saying y’all are gonna be all surprised_pikachu.jpg when it turns out to do fuck-all to solve the actual problem.
Edit: the irrational downvotes on my comments only help prove my point. People just can’t deal with reality, so they childishly lash out instead.
Just so you’re aware, downvotes have never proven someone’s point.
Institutional investors have tended to cluster their purchases, resulting in more concentrated investments in certain neighborhoods in a handful of markets, including Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Charlotte, and Tampa. The 2024 GAO report found that they own 25% of single-family rental homes in Atlanta and 21% of those in Jacksonville. Researchers have found that mega landlords may have contributed to the rise in housing costs, particularly in areas where they’re heavily concentrated.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ban-wall-street-buying-houses-not-solution-home-prices-2026-1
1 in every 25 homes in England are empty
https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/
Over 15 million American homes — approximately 10% of the country’s housing inventory — were vacant in 2024.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…
There’s certainly no market manipulation that renders supply and demand utter bollocks.
10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.
I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that’s empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?
Let’s make an example. Rent let’s say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?
I have friend that lives in Vegas. They are stuck in the house they bought since the private equity ownership seems to be keeping a ton of empty homes off the market to keep scarcity and thus prices high. These companies have deep pockets and can weather the storm over long periods until the market shifts in their favor again.
As the other person mentions, vacant homes in some rural area are irrelevant when you can not work there. Look at Japan if you want to see that dialed up to 11.
None of those statistics ever take into account where the empty homes are. It doesn’t matter if houses in the middle of nowhere are empty because nobody wants to live there. What matters is how many homes are allowed to exist closer in to the cities where people actually want to live.
But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…
That’s absolutely ass-backwards bullshit. Back in reality, building density is what creates walkability, not what destroys it! Quit being dishonest.
Shouldn’t be a market for housing or healthcare
Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.
no, unfortunately people don’t seem to get that. there’s a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.
That was a plot on Little House on the Prairie.
A farm auction in rural Nebraska, where the land is exactly the polar opposite of scarce, has fuck-all to do with my point about density in cities.
I think your attitude is missing an even bigger picture on top of your bigger markets picture. People can be black rock assholes masturbating with their invisible hands or they can be nice to each other. Markets will adapt…
Good luck with that
