The market is not “places to rent”, it’s “places to live.” If the cost of buying a home falls, the cost of renting a home will fall as well to compete.
If you look at the market as “places to live” then banning corporate home purchasing does nothing to supply or demand and thus does not change the price at all. There are still the same number of people who need housing.
If what you are saying is true, the cost of renting should have gone down as more private equity gets into the residential market. The opposite has happened.
Everything we’re talking about is relative to what prices would be otherwise. Rent has increased because there was massive inflation, that doesn’t prove or disprove the impact of corporate homeownership.
Taking (corporate) buyers out of the market is what reducing demand means. Not to mention the corporate buyers are the ones buying up real estate so they can profit off the difference between the rent they charge and the loans they pay off. They’re very much unnecessary middlemen. I’m not saying smaller landlords don’t do that too, but corporate involvement is one of the reasons investor buying power so heavily outweighs resident buying power.
Real estate values have been massively outpacing inflation for decades. Inflation is normal, and has always been a force in economics. Such a huge portion of the middle and working class being unable to own a house is not normal, and since we haven’t had a population explosion or a collapse of the construction industry, a bubble is the best explanation.
Taking (corporate) buyers out of the market is what reducing demand means.
The corporate buyers are just buying the houses to rent out. They are switching the home from owned to rented. The corporation isn’t a living person who lives in the house they bought. They only impact demand in the amount they switch, which only matters if you’re splitting up owned vs rented, because that’s what they change. If you’re combining all housing demand to be all people who need housing, the corporations have zero demand for housing, they don’t impact overall demand at all.
Not to mention the corporate buyers are the ones buying up real estate so they can profit off the difference between the rent they charge and the loans they pay off. They’re very much unnecessary middlemen. I’m not saying smaller landlords don’t do that too, but corporate involvement is one of the reasons investor buying power so heavily outweighs resident buying power.
There’s always a profit motive at any level, prices are going to be a result of market forces, we don’t give them extra because they’re a corporation. If a corporation is acting monopolistically, that should obviously be banned, and it is.
There’s a larger structural question on whether ALL landlording is “unnecessary middlemen” but that as a solution would be such a huge change and involve seizing property and such that I think that’s outside the realm of the possible. If we’re allowing some landlords, profit is just going to be part of rental payments as it already is.
If you look at the market as “places to live” then banning corporate home purchasing does nothing to supply or demand and thus does not change the price at all. There are still the same number of people who need housing.
Everything we’re talking about is relative to what prices would be otherwise. Rent has increased because there was massive inflation, that doesn’t prove or disprove the impact of corporate homeownership.
Taking (corporate) buyers out of the market is what reducing demand means. Not to mention the corporate buyers are the ones buying up real estate so they can profit off the difference between the rent they charge and the loans they pay off. They’re very much unnecessary middlemen. I’m not saying smaller landlords don’t do that too, but corporate involvement is one of the reasons investor buying power so heavily outweighs resident buying power.
Real estate values have been massively outpacing inflation for decades. Inflation is normal, and has always been a force in economics. Such a huge portion of the middle and working class being unable to own a house is not normal, and since we haven’t had a population explosion or a collapse of the construction industry, a bubble is the best explanation.
The corporate buyers are just buying the houses to rent out. They are switching the home from owned to rented. The corporation isn’t a living person who lives in the house they bought. They only impact demand in the amount they switch, which only matters if you’re splitting up owned vs rented, because that’s what they change. If you’re combining all housing demand to be all people who need housing, the corporations have zero demand for housing, they don’t impact overall demand at all.
There’s always a profit motive at any level, prices are going to be a result of market forces, we don’t give them extra because they’re a corporation. If a corporation is acting monopolistically, that should obviously be banned, and it is.
There’s a larger structural question on whether ALL landlording is “unnecessary middlemen” but that as a solution would be such a huge change and involve seizing property and such that I think that’s outside the realm of the possible. If we’re allowing some landlords, profit is just going to be part of rental payments as it already is.