[HN Gopher] Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-...
___________________________________________________________________
Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
Author : pseudolus
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-09-19 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thebignewsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thebignewsletter.com)
| firejake308 wrote:
| > the cost of shelter accounts for 70% of all inflation for the
| last twelve months
|
| Technically, this should read "70% of inflation in all items less
| food and energy". And since enrgy costs are actually down for the
| past year, this basically says that rent increases are the
| majority cause of inflation except maybe food, but that's not
| clear from the BLS data linked.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| It's like there's a shortage of housing or something.
| hnthrow289570 wrote:
| Why would you need to collude for higher rents with RealPage
| if a shortage of housing was the primary driver of rent
| increases?
|
| If someone's being that greedy, they can't really use supply
| and demand to say their hands were tied in terms of
| controlling rent.
| derektank wrote:
| If you have the option to extract rents by forming a cartel
| (without legal punishment), you'll do it regardless of the
| underlying value of the asset you're trying to control
| because it's free money (assuming you can trust the other
| members of the cartel)
| papercrane wrote:
| That's true in some markets, but the DOJ complaint highlights
| some places, like Atlanta, where vacancy rates have gone up,
| but rents have still climbed higher.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Rent is 36.1% of the CPI basket - so if inflation was
| distributed evenly - you'd expect 36.1% of the increase to come
| from rent / housing.
|
| 70% is really not that shocking. Rents only need to increase a
| little bit more than average with most other things increasing
| a little bit less than average to end up at 70%.
|
| Vehicles and energy make up almost 14% of the basket - and
| those are negative.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| The middle case is that we are paying 2.6% higher rent due to
| RealPage.
|
| I don't think the aggressive piece is realistic. And if we break
| up RealPage I highly doubt we'll see an significant drop in rent
| prices.
|
| An interesting analysis would be looking at vacancy rate across
| different cities over time. If we saw a large increase in cities
| with a high penetration of RealPage I'd be more inclined to
| believe it's having a significant impact.
|
| For California and Text at least it looks like the price increase
| is classical supply and demand driven. We're not building enough
| multifamily or apartments.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TXRVAC
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CARVAC
| flimsypremise wrote:
| In NYC I can tell you that the metropolitan area lost about
| 500,000 people since 2020, added ~20-30k housing units per year
| in that same time. The vacancy rate somehow dropped
| dramatically despite this and rents also rose dramatically.
| I've yet to see any good explanation for this, yet you'll still
| see people advocate for building more housing as the solution.
|
| Simply using the rental vacancy rate as a proxy for supply and
| demand does not work, since there are lots of factors that can
| affect vacancies. One of then, as outlined in the article, is
| landlords keep units off the market to drive up prices.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| The explanation is that there isn't enough housing to meet
| demand. That's it. Until there is, prices will keep going up
| even when building more units.
|
| Landlords wouldn't be buying up a ton of units and renting
| them out at a profit if there was a glut of inventory,
| because it would be a terrible investment.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Or, accounting and tax law makes it less painful to keep
| units vacant than reprice them at lower rents.
|
| Which is a thing we could change via something like
| Vancouver's vacancy tax.
|
| Make it more in landlords' interest to reprice units lower,
| if the market has excess inventory.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Landlords are not keeping units off the market to drive up
| prices. There are no landlords who have the pricing power to
| make that work. There is no landlord that can keep 10% of his
| inventory off the market to drive up rental prices 11%.
| tptacek wrote:
| The problem I have with this analysis is that it's tying RealPage
| to the _politicized_ perception of rent inflation --- i.e., when
| the news cycles about it began. But affordability has been a
| crisis for something approaching a decade now, far precedes
| RealPage, and impacts places RealPage doesn 't operate.
|
| There's a subtext in this article that you have to follow Stoller
| to know about, which is whether he's aligning himself with the
| NIMBY opposition to the YIMBY movement, so I expect him to take
| some flak for these arguments, whether or not RealPage is a
| proximate cause of higher rents (I have no reason to disbelieve
| him on that point; by all means burn it to the ground).
| seper8 wrote:
| There are very few jobs that provides as little value as being a
| landlord. Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens?
| People just keep on living as usual, maybe they'll have to clean
| their own drain and paint their poorly maintained (ex)rental
| unit...
|
| Its the upscale equivalent of ticket or GPU scalping (the
| practice of buying up all material and simply only upselling it
| for more money).
|
| Parasites of the system.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think you're underestimating how many people can clean their
| own drain (well).
|
| Which is its own solvable problem, but is a problem.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The modern way is to have a handyman (just like you have a
| gardner or cleaner). The handyman has a list of gutters to
| empty, squeaky hinges to oil, HVAC filters to clean, etc.
|
| Keep adding these small tasks to the list, and when the list
| gets long or something urgent comes up, call the handyman out
| for a half-day.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It's a problem whether the occupier is a renter or homeowner.
| The landlord is, in my experience, just going to call a
| handyman anyway. May as well cut out the middleman as thats
| something I can do myself.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens?
|
| The majority of landlords in the US (at least in the small
| scale - not sure about big complexes) do not own the property
| outright. They have a loan (e.g. mortgage) just like anyone
| else.
|
| So what will happen? The banks will become the new owners. And
| they'll sell it at a discount to someone else (with a loan, of
| course).
|
| I know it's easy to complain about landlords, but if you
| suddenly kill all landlords and ban landlording, you'll get a
| lot more homeless people.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I guess in this hypothetical, imagine all ownership of the
| rental units suddenly transferred to the tenant. Would the
| net effect to the economy be positive or negative?
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| The construction industry would collapse as buying
| confidence would disappear. Buildings with large amounts of
| renters would likely fall into disarray over the long term.
| card_zero wrote:
| Seems like the same problem results: now what if you're a
| new renter? You can't live anywhere, because there's no
| landlords. Does somebody just give you a house, in this
| scenario, and if so, who?
| BeetleB wrote:
| In the short term, positive. But then their kids will grow
| up and no one is willing to invest in new housing.
|
| Unless you want to live in government built housing.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-family
| and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into SFH, or
| sold off as condos.
|
| And everyone would have to live with parents or friends until
| they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a worse
| world than the one we live in.
| exe34 wrote:
| would they be demolished? or would their prices drop to the
| point that the people paying the mortgage might be able to
| afford to actually own the equity?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Why wouldn't they just convert to owner-occupied apartments?
|
| There's an argument to be made about affordability, but there
| are a lot of arguments against paying someone else, for which
| you receive no equity, and they get to keep any price
| appreciation of the property.
|
| It'd be interesting to see a rental market that banned
| anything but rent-to-own contracts, where some portion of
| your monthly rent had to buy equity in the property you
| occupy. (With standardized terms for disposal, sale, etc)
| timr wrote:
| Because most people can't afford to buy the apartment they
| are renting. Some huge percentage of US citizens can't
| scrape together enough money to pay for a car repair. How
| are they going to afford an apartment?
| tofof wrote:
| This is trivially false. The sum of the rents of the
| tenants of the property is enough to cover the landlord's
| purchase of the building, any interest on any loan used
| to secure that purchase, hire upkeep for the building,
| and still have money left over for profit in the
| landlord's pocket.
|
| Therefore, the sum of the rents of the tenants of the
| property is enough to cover the purchase of the building,
| which is a subset of those costs.
| timr wrote:
| > The sum of the rents of the tenants of the property is
| enough to cover the landlord's purchase of the building,
| any interest on any loan used to secure that purchase,
| hire upkeep for the building, and still have money left
| over for profit in the landlord's pocket.
|
| The "sum of the rents of the tenants" isn't relevant to a
| single tenant, the loan isn't used to "secure the
| purchase", and you're confusing cash flow for total
| equity.
|
| A building owner puts down a deposit for some percentage
| (say, 20%) of the building's cost, gets 80% in debt, and
| pays down that debt _over time_ with the cash flow from
| the tenants ' rent payments. They make a small margin net
| of expenses, plus whatever equity accumulates over time.
|
| Setting aside the (significant) question of whether or
| not a given tenant would have the _credit_ necessary to
| do such a thing, a tenant is not necessarily able to do
| the same thing, just because they can afford to pay the
| rent.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Doesn't that indicate we should be building more and
| cheaper housing?
|
| The other components of the market aren't fixed and
| immutable.
|
| If state governments wanted to mandate denser rezoning
| and smaller minimum unit sizes once unaffordability
| reached a certain level... they could.
|
| Pointing at expensive housing and saying "We therefore
| have to make it cheaper by forcing more people into
| bargains in which they receive none of the gains" seems
| like the tail wagging the dog.
| timr wrote:
| Sure, but it wouldn't change anything, unless your plan
| is to make housing so cheap that it literally costs less
| than a month of rent to buy the whole place, I don't
| think you're going to have a lot of luck.
| avidiax wrote:
| Yeah, a system with implied equity from renting (something
| like 2-3% per year) would go a long way.
|
| Switzerland also has an interesting system that seems
| designed to somewhat equalize renting vs. owning.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I've always heard owner occupied apartments called condos.
| Is there a difference I'm not aware of?
|
| You're paying the landlord for the cost of capital and the
| property management. And a 400k house in the stock market
| would on average generate 40k a year in appreciation. Most
| apartments in functional markets aren't anywhere near that
| appreciative.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| > Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-
| family and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into
| SFH, or sold off as condos.
|
| > And everyone would have to live with parents or friends
| until they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a
| worse world than the one we live in.
|
| You are using a logical fallacy known as false dichotomy. We
| have many other possibilities such as commie blocks and even
| denser privately owned residential housing with fair
| competition and pricing. Maybe hard to achieve fair pricing
| but not impossible.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You'd have to outline how the current system isn't fair, or
| even what fair is.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Why would they be demolished(a debit) when they could be
| sold(a credit)? 34% of people live in rental housing. If
| those units flooded the market, it'd be much easier to save
| up to buy while living with parents or friends.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If everyone's saving up to buy then the prices will go up.
| This is a demand problem, not a landlord problem. Too much
| demand vs supply makes prices go up. Far, far too much
| demand vs supply means landlords step in and invest, and
| divide properties into smaller pieces to rebalance supply
| to demand, or as much as is in each one's power.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| It's really hard to get a mortgage for multiple people that
| aren't married.
|
| Basically if you and 3 friends want to buy a 4-plex for
| 400k you would assume the bank would just make sure each
| person could afford 100k, they don't. Instead the bank will
| ensure each person individually has sufficient financial
| resources to afford a 400k home.
|
| That and converting a 4 plex into condos doesn't make
| financial sense when you could just demolish it and build
| townhomes.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| What would probably happen is following. It depends on many
| things, but assuming it is done near instantly and there
| aren't side effects.
|
| For some time house values would drop, they will be sold to
| largest possible buyers. This isn't small buyers but probably
| banks, since they have lots of capital. Because of price
| drops, demand will be lessened and house construction
| industry will experience layoffs.
|
| Many people will be without a house to rent, so banks or
| large money interests will offer their stockpile of houses
| under strict terms i.e. rent without renting
| (timeshare/leasing/house borrowing).
|
| You'll get landlords but with deeper pockets.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Although I agree with the sentiment, is there a quantifiable
| way to demonstrate this? For instance, do people who declare
| their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income
| distribution x std deviations above some control group?
|
| I'd imagine they do but I try hard to not just imagine data
| matches my priors. (Yes, this almost always makes me unpopular)
| londons_explore wrote:
| They can be parasites even without being richer.
|
| Merely the fact that a typical landlord works far fewer hours
| than most other careers. Even a property portfolio of 100
| properties probably isn't a full time job if you have
| managing agents.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| This is nonsense. The vast majority of landlords have to
| work a day job in order to finance the property in the
| first place.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sure but many groups of people work to service debt, such
| as the purchase of a house, education, medical expense or
| a small business loan. Demonstrating that landlords are
| not all of the leisure class is insufficient to imply
| they are equally living hard scrabble working lives
| compared to the population writ large.
| ajross wrote:
| > For instance, do people who declare their occupation as
| landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std
| deviations above some control group?
|
| Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink
| into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there
| you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be
| making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is
| a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better.
|
| Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord
| looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not
| fair".
|
| But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is
| just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix
| plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an
| office".
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| So, you get to work a part time job while being richer than
| most working full time jobs. Not a bad gig, but it doesn't
| feel very fair to wage workers.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I mean to be really, truly Marxist about it, it's not the
| occupation of landlord but the rentier social relation
| that's problematic.
|
| The theory is it extracts productive capital which could
| have a better multiplier effect allocated elsewhere such
| as education, research, public infrastructure, etc.
|
| I'm sure there's some economic wonks that have long
| academic papers on this to support or refute this 170 or
| so year old idea, but I'm merely an amateur.
|
| There was an economic movement after Henry George that
| very adamantly advocated for redoing this social
| relationship if you're curious. It was (most likely) the
| inspiration for the original version of Monopoly among
| other things. It _might_ be regarded as a form of
| Economic Populism if you look at the adjacent beliefs of
| the prominent early 20th c. Georgists, but that 's
| probably a 5,000+ word essay.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sorry to press but do you have evidence?
|
| Maybe the number of bankruptcies of landlords versus other
| professions normalized for age (since many bankruptcies are
| health related and landlords tend to be older).
|
| Is there some hard data somewhere that can be scrutinized
| rather than narratives and sentiment?
| kibwen wrote:
| There's a good reason that "rent-seeking" is one of the biggest
| insults you can hurl at a business model.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, because it's trying to make your business as legally
| necessary as a tax. It's to do with regulation, not renting
| things.
| kibwen wrote:
| No, it's to do with being a useless middleman who extracts
| wealth without serving any productive economic purpose.
| Regulation isn't required in the slightest.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That seems like an easy, reflexive way to ride current wave of
| discontent over housing prices. I am not suggesting that
| landlords are not entirely blameless in the equation, but
| suggesting they add no value at all is shortsighted.
|
| Not to mention the obvious, the new owner would become the new
| landlord and the process would start all over.
|
| I have to tell you though. This weird attitude makes me
| hesitate on my next move. My family unit was discussing keeping
| current house ( and likely rent ) and moving into something
| further away. I will admit that this anti-landlord sentiment
| makes consider just straight sale to the highest bidder.
|
| Like.. I have a married friend, whose dad is an actual landlord
| asshole ( and he was confronted over that ), but not everyone
| is an asshole despite what some recent actions by humans may
| suggest.
| itake wrote:
| Who manages repairing an upkeep on the property if not the
| landlord?
| gambiting wrote:
| The person living there, obviously.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I've seen way too many people wrecking the place they rent
| for that to be true.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| You can say similar things about shareholders or anyone else
| who allocates capital.
|
| Calling landlords parasites is like blaming tech employees for
| gentrification. You're missing the bigger picture.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| In a rent-controlled area like in parts of Canada, it's not
| unusual for the tenant to improve the apartment they are
| renting with the consent of the landlord. This is ultimately to
| the tenants' benefit. Imagine investing $1200 into new
| flooring. Spread over 3/4 years of rent controlled rent, it
| comes out to $25 a month.
| skybrian wrote:
| The world has a lot of buildings. Buildings are valuable. Every
| building you see, unless it's been abandoned, is owned by
| someone or some entity that's responsible for acquiring,
| protecting, and maintaining it. Some do a better job than
| others.
|
| Not that landlords do construction work themselves - that's a
| different industry. But someone has to arrange financing. Many
| renters are not trusted by banks enough to get a mortgage,
| often for good reasons. They still need a place to live,
| though.
|
| Someone has to try to prevent people from damaging the
| buildings and repair them when they are damaged. Maybe that's
| the super, but someone has to hire them. The people who damage
| buildings are often pretty nasty.
|
| In theory, the state could do this. In some countries, the
| state does a lot of it. But _someone_ has to do it. It 's an
| essential job, and if not a landlord, there will be a manager
| that does pretty much the same thing.
|
| Just about everything can be outsourced, but it adds overhead.
| The labor doesn't go away, it just gets moved around.
|
| Not everyone is ready and willing to be responsible for a
| building.
| smileysteve wrote:
| As if landlords clean the drains, provide a decent paint job.
|
| Maybe in an apartment, a maintenance person might; but smaller
| rentals; at most the landlord charges the tenant and calls a
| plumber;
|
| in reality the tenant is often responsible for calling and
| paying the plumber;
|
| At worst, the landlord has never had the plumbing cleaned or
| inspected, the tenant or landlord hires a plumber, the plumber
| finds an object stuck at the tree roots in the pipe, and the
| landlord charges the tenant for the whole job, threatens the
| security deposit, and when the tenant refuses to pay, the
| landlord evicts them.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Also: Up to 30% of app pricing is due to price-fixing.
|
| We (including the companies cannibalizing their own ecosystems
| for profit) would all be better off with a refresh of competition
| enhancing laws that (a) decrease barriers to entry & (b) apply
| increasing competitive restrictions as market share and absolute
| company size grow.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| You could say the same about prices in general increasing due
| to credit card fees ($.30 per transaction + 3%).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It's not realpage causing inflation. Come on
|
| Look, the first most important totally big thing is that at the
| beginning of covid governments around the world printed a
| boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for waiters and
| nurses and construction workers. And that was a Good Thing.
| People could eat and pay rent. But that took a boatload of cash -
| US printed 10 trillion dollars - the UK a trillion. 27 European
| nations all did something similar - the Middle East. Noone knows
| how much but it's tens of trillions - perhaps let's say 50
| trillion. With a T.
|
| Then that money went to the landlords and the supermarkets and
| the. Went up to the supermarket shareholders and the owners of
| the office buildings and eventually the wealthy - those who can
| live without salary - they got almost all of it. And they have to
| spend that money on something - property, stocks, gold, land
|
| It's inflation because there is an extra fifty trillion floating
| around.
|
| Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price information
| and telling landlords "hey a flat like this is renting for 20% on
| the next street". Well that's because some part of that fifty
| trillion just got invested in a company that hired a guy who
| moved into the neighbourhood- it's going to chnage the character
| of the neighbourhood and those who are unlucky get squeezed out
| the bottom and sleep in a park looking over the Golden Gate.
|
| Look at any article in MMT. This is something we solve with 1.
| Taxation (equal tax treatments for capital gains etc) and 2. Sane
| social policies (education, health etc)
|
| The DOJ is looking for a culprit who is breaking a system that
| otherwise would work - that's the point of anti-cartel laws. Ut
| the system is broken - and it has a simple fix. Tax the rich - we
| did it for Russian Olivarchs, now spread the love
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > printed a boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for
| waiters and nurses and construction workers ... US printed 10
| trillion dollars
|
| Well, I don't think 10 trillion was paid to waiters and nurses
| and construction workers, etc. I'm curious what that actual
| number was. I'd be surprised if it touched 1 trillion.
| Something like 250 billion sounds more plausible to me, but if
| anyone has a source that would be interesting.
|
| 10 trillion was added to the money supply, but I believe the
| vast majority of it went somewhere else and never passed
| through the sort of people you mention.
|
| The money supply expansion did juice the stock market and
| avoided a recession on paper, while shifting real value from
| savers and earners over to asset holders. Working as intended,
| I suppose.
|
| I think the biggest BS aspect of inflation is that wages are
| set in USD basically universally and are therefore subject to
| inflation.
|
| You can choose to move your savings out of USD and into
| something more stable, but if you are a worker you can't move
| your comp into anything else.
|
| The second most BS part is being taxed on inflation whenever
| you sell assets. Even if the asset doesn't have any real
| appreciation, you get to pay tax on whatever the government
| decided to inflate the currency by. Absolute nonsense.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think we are in basic agreement
|
| >>> while shifting real value from savers and earners over to
| asset holders. Working as intended, I suppose.
|
| No furlough directly did not receive all of that but the
| "cost of covid" (the amount spent by government without
| taxing it back) was on that order. I wish I had a better line
| accounting of it.
|
| But the basic effect is the same - the owners of assets - the
| wealthiest in society, get a greater proportion of the
| "tokens that allocate future resource allocation" (dollars)
| than previously - and this means they put that money
| somewhere - and we see that as inflation everywhere.
|
| The solution as I see it is taxing the assets (not a "wealth
| tax" but more same approaches).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price
| information and telling landlords "hey a flat like this is
| renting for 20% on the next street"._
|
| Not true and not what RealPage is being charged with.
|
| What RealPage actually did was: - Provide a
| suggested rent - Set their default at "use suggested
| rent" - Promise landlords that suggested rent would
| always increase - Pressure landorders who rented under
| the suggested price - Connect landlords, so they could
| talk about pricing
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| > - Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price
|
| How did RealPage do this? I'm OOTL.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Never mind it's taboo to talk about how the pandemic made you
| wealthy. The divide is real, and I feel for the people who
| thought a $2000 stimulus check was a win. If only they knew
| about assets and broker margin.
| lumost wrote:
| To my knowledge, this has only ever been done successfully
| during ww2. The mechanism used was semi-forced lending via war
| bonds. The war bonds were predominantly purchased by wealthy
| individuals and the rate of return was lower than all
| alternatives.
|
| The spending of war debt on the other hand went out to common
| individuals. As the war debt was never repaid, encumbants would
| spend the next 2 decades with lower rates of return compared to
| new market participants.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As the war debt was never repaid
|
| The war debt was, in fact, repaid.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| It's not making things better...
| elashri wrote:
| According to the IMF [1]. The world GDP in 2020 was about 85T.
| I really would question such a high estimation for the printed
| money to be anything near 50T or even something high to these
| levels.
|
| [1]
| https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think the biggest culprit behind rent inflation isn't companies
| like RealPage (evil as they may be), nor landlords, but
| _homeowners_. Who vote for laws that make housing harder to
| build.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| I wonder if addressing price fixing in rent prices will ease the
| regulations around short-term rentals (which have shown to also
| increase rents by about 3%).
| plutaniano wrote:
| I wonder if we will ever reach a point where implementing a land
| value tax will be politically feasible. All other solutions look
| like bandaids to me.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is a housing shortage.
|
| That's it.
|
| Fix it by building more housing.
|
| Nothing else is gonna do anything.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| That, and people who were born this century have no idea about
| the immensity of housing inflation.
|
| In 2007, a 1-BR apartment in Hanover, NH was USD 750. With
| official inflation at 3 % that would be now something like USD
| 1325. Good luck finding anything below USD 2250 these days.
| That's 7 %, more than double headline inflation.
|
| It's a complete policy failure, also because housing is about
| the most unproductive kind of investment there is.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Even if you fix all the zoning and land supply problems, you
| still need to qualify this as building the right kind of
| housing. Building more large, expensive homes that are gobbled
| up by investors or people 'parking' money isn't going to help
| people that need cheap dwellings to actually live in.
|
| I'm not saying you're not aware of this or that your statement
| doesn't include the possibility, but (housing) developers will
| follow the money, and that doesn't mean making small affordable
| homes when the profit margins on other types of dwelling are
| higher.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-19 23:01 UTC)