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Companies that buy up homes should be known as home scalpers (lemmy.ca)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Yeah no. Last i checked there are 4 times as many empty apartments than homeless people in Germany. The housing market here is completely fucked and corporate housing ownership needs to be disincentivized or outright banned for this to be solved. Whenever people try to buy housing they will be outbid by companies that already have plenty of capital. This leads to an everlasting spiral where the rich people will always have more buying power and normal people are perpetually stuck paying absurd rents to those same rich people making them even richer.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    But the vacancy rate is not shooting up; it's steady/decreasing: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/31454.jpeg

    I can't find any good data on corporate versus individual ownership.

    Whenever people try to buy housing they will be outbid by companies that already have plenty of capital. This leads to an everlasting spiral where the rich people will always have more buying power and normal people are perpetually stuck paying absurd rents to those same rich people making them even richer.

    How is this different when every house for rent is owned by an individual? They have the exact same incentive to charge high rents.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    How is this different when every house for rent is owned by an individual?

    Obviously there should be limits to individual land ownership too...

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    I mean, if every house for rent is owned by someone who only owns a small number of houses. They still want to charge as much rent as they can get away with. Always have.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Which brings us back to the issue of all the empty and unused housing which is used to artificially increase rent levels. There is actually more supply than demand, but the supply is being limited by the gatekeepers (corporate and individual landlords). With proper legislation this would improve quite a bit.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    As far as I understand, in the USA large corporate ownership of housing is a recent phenomenon, whilst vacancy rates have been trending downwards. Example chart

    What is "all the empty and unused housing"? Why are vacancy rates going down if this is pushing the price up?

    I agree: if large companies bought up enough housing stock that they were able to let it lie empty to push prices up (and then actually did it) it could cause a big increase in prices/rents, and that would be a big problem. But we just do not see it in the data.

    In contrast, we do see that, in the USA, home building has not kept pace with increases in population. This chart plots the ratio of population growth to housing growth. It was about 1.5 in the 70s, meaning that for every 3 people who were born or arrived in the US, 2 houses were started. Nowadays that ratio is around 2.5.

    There is a MASSIVE OBVIOUS explanation for huge increases in rent/house prices.

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