Comment on Companies that buy up homes should be known as home scalpers
FishFace@piefed.social 4 hours agoYour point by point objections don’t really change the picture - these are all things that people do. In a market that is not completely elastic, if you increase prices, some people will stop paying and we will see that in the data. Every time I’ve checked this for the USA (where this argument is usually made) there is no recent increase in vacancy rates.
So how about I offer you an alternative scenario: investment companies are seeing that housing is shooting up in value already, due to low rates of building, hence making it a more attractive investment relative to other things. So they buy them up and charge high rents - but at the same time all the individual owners of rental property also see that they can charge high rents, and do so. All we’ve done is swapped who is screwing renters, not by how much.
If this has “literally been studied” then I’d be very happy to see the studies - like I said I’ve tried to find data on this, and never found anything to suggest that replacing individual owners with corporate owners increases prices. Maybe my search-engine-fu is lacking (but also… every other time I’ve discussed this online no-one has come up with anything either. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t hold this position for lack of trying to challenge it.) But in contrast, I’ve seen plenty of studies comparing population growth to house building and coming up with a huge deficit.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
You’re looking at the wrong stats. When people are forced to spend more on necessities, they don’t cut necessities. They can’t. They’re necessities.
They cut luxuries.
One such relevant stat, would be piracy spiking.
FishFace@piefed.social 4 hours ago
Well then, we’re back to some people cutting their costs by doing all the things I said above. You dismissed them all as if reasons why they’re not practical are reasons why they’re impossible.
All those landlords have the exact same incentives to charge as much as they can get away with, to subdivide properties and to exploit their renters as corporate landlords do. Consolidation can allow prices to increase - but it doesn’t always, and typically not by a lot, until consolidation reaches very high levels. 3-7% is what I’ve read for company mergers (note that the case studies include large market shares and companies dealing in necessities).
So I propose that corporate landlords have manipulated the market by no more than 10%. So about 6 months of house price increases at current rates, or two years at less crazy rates. Everything else is caused by low supply and such.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
No. I dismissed them as insufficient to show up in the stats.
Duh. But are you really going to claim single property owners competing with every other single property owner, wouldn’t have different results than duopolistic companies carving up sities and throwing their weight around in legislation?
Have you considered that larger companies are also able to act to maintain the low supply?
Real-estate and construction overlap a great deal, and that influence also grows with consolidation.
And thanks for linking to a study that confirms what I’m trying to say? 3-7% of the largest bill most people have is not nothing.
Does that percentage account for wage stagnation?
A few comments ago you were clamining low supply is the only problem.
FishFace@piefed.social 3 hours ago
If people really thought that companies buying real estate might, at most, contribute a few percent of the price, while limited supply has led to price increases of hundreds of percent, then we’d be getting constant memes about insufficient house-building and pushes to change that, rather than this kind of thing.
I want to change the narrative, because if all people hear is “COMPANIES ARE BUYING UP HOUSES AND JACKING UP RENTS” they won’t push for the policies which will have a bigger impact.