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Kiwi Ghost Chips
Feb 19, 2011

Start using the best desktop environment now!
Choose KDE!

EAB posted:

I have been shopping for houses the past year and was wondering why there could be sooooo many vacant houses but the prices remain so high. I guess it's because hedge funds / the rich are just gobbling up as much real estate as possible, forcing you to rent or pay inflated prices?

This world is hosed up.

That would be a really dumb hedge fund to do that.

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Buffer
May 6, 2007
I sometimes turn down sex and blowjobs from my girlfriend because I'm too busy posting in D&D. PS: She used my credit card to pay for this.
Austin is the scrappy doo of tech. It's not even the 3rd biggest tech city in Texas, it just has some highly visible and sexy things whereas enterprise IT is dull and quiet.

computer parts posted:

I'm assuming you're living in a tech heavy area, in which case you probably don't have to worry about this going on for too much longer.

Greater Boston, so sort of. It's way more complicated then tech here though, tech is just the latest thing to drive prices up in a subsection of the area(again I should say, as Rt.128 was the MA miracle of the 80s). We also have things like being the educational capital of the country combining with none of the schools building enough housing(while accepting more and more students) to cause kids to stack up 5-6 to a unit and massively distort prices within the city; mainly in what were the more affordable neighborhoods. It's like a rotating crop of suckers. Then poo poo like mommy and daddy buying kiddo a condo for their stay at Harvard.

This then pushes people out into suburban areas, which inflate prices there as housing stock and turnover are low, and repeat.

Grognan
Jan 23, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

EAB posted:

I have been shopping for houses the past year and was wondering why there could be sooooo many vacant houses but the prices remain so high. I guess it's because hedge funds / the rich are just gobbling up as much real estate as possible, forcing you to rent or pay inflated prices?

This world is hosed up.

Nah, the hedge funds are targeting places with rising prices because there's actually demand and decent paying jobs appearing there.

LemonDrizzle
Mar 28, 2012

neoliberal shithead
The Economist has a couple of interactive graphs based on the Case-Shiller house price index that may be of interest to readers of this thread: US house prices and global house prices



The example of Germany clearly demonstrates the perils of excessive state intervention in the housing market: only very minor fluctuations in real-terms prices, with slow gradual price deflation. No fun at all.

LemonDrizzle fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jun 9, 2014

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Buffer posted:

Austin is the scrappy doo of tech. It's not even the 3rd biggest tech city in Texas, it just has some highly visible and sexy things whereas enterprise IT is dull and quiet.

Yeah, we have the bad, bubbly kind of tech and not the boring stuff that actually makes money outside of convincing VC to roll the dice on a new app with a misspelled name in a cute font.

enbot
Jun 7, 2013

on the left posted:

You are ignoring the fact that a house easily has cash income, either rental rates, or imputed rental rates for owner-occupied housing. Housing is an investment, it's just not a very good one. The high returns experienced are typically because people use leverage, hold for a long time, and have very little churn.

If banks let you borrow 500k at 4% to invest in the stock market, you should absolutely do that instead, but typically the only way you'll borrow lots of money is to buy a house/car.

When the average person thinks of housing as an investment, it is not because they are thinking about rental income. Not to mention rentals are only really an investment when you buy a bunch of them, otherwise you are doing the stock market equivalent of picking a single stock. They think that houses are an investment because they expect to sell for more than they bought for. But there's no reason to expect housing to beat inflation (historically they have only appreciated at .1% more than inflation) and even if they do that just means you are going to have to pay more for the next house you buy, negating any gain.

I'm sure they are technically "investments" but they should not be treated as such by the average person.

mastershakeman posted:

This is a big deal, and it's usually not addressed at all. It's pretty much impossible to find a small house to rent in Chicagoland that isn't hours away from downtown. The entire concept of renting a 1k sqft place that might have a yard or garage is just completely foreign, even though anecdotally I know a lot of people who would jump at the opportunity to live in such a building.


Here's the other thing - it isn't demand in cities, it's demand in the 'safe' (white) parts of cities. Major cities have lost millions of people since the 1950s. Again, Chicago is an example - in 1950 the population was 3.6million, without any of the high density high rises that have come to dominate the near north and the lakefront. Now, it's 2.7m. So 1/4 of the city is gone, yet prices are vastly, vastly higher. Even just the microcosm of the last 5 years shows this - prices are above the 2008 peak in the safe zipcodes, and absolutely flatlined in the others.

What needs to happen is politicians rebuilding the entire city's infrastructure, not just the community that is the most politically influential, so that people can live anywhere in said region. But that will never happen.

Well not flatlined- the poor areas lost quite a bit of value. This is why prices are down about 30% overall from the peak. But yea- what happened is during the 50's you had the flight to the suburbs and now well off people are doing the reverse and buying expensive luxury condos in the good parts of town.

Other than that, hours is an exaggeration -if you put your radius on the high side of one hour you can certainly find affordable houses to rent. Now if you are only looking at 30 min or so then it will certainly become unaffordable simply because where the hell are you going to put these things? There's not enough room to have a high enough supply of housing so that they are "affordable" if you are looking at the inner ring suburbs. I mean poo poo, of course it sounds nice and I'm sure there's tons of people who would love to rent such a place- that's why places like that go for a lot of loving money! I'm honestly unsure of how you "address" this - there just simply is not enough room in the areas people want to live. What does "rebuilding the city's infrastructure" even mean? What exactly are you going to do that's going to open up cheap housing in extremely desirable places? How do you ensure that people can live anywhere they want when everyone wants to live in the same place?

Given the opportunities, Chicago really is one of the cheapest big cities already. You can find nice 1 bedrooms for under 900 a month that are within 20-30 minutes of the loop by rail, good loving luck finding that in other top tier cities.

mastershakeman
Oct 28, 2008

by vyelkin
By infrastructure, I largely mean rail. The south and west sides are heavily neglected because they historically have no political pull (not true of the South Side Irish though in Bridgeport). Those areas are a quick commute to downtown and have a lot of single family homes, but due to the lack of policing, their roads being garbage, and there simply not being enough El stops (look at the green line with nothing between Ashland and California, while the Brown line is stopping every two blocks in places). Basically, the city needs to make the south/west sides desirable, instead of just the North side within 4 blocks of El stops.

And yeah, listing distances by hours is dicey. Heck, my girlfriend's sister lives in Winnetka and has a 35 minute commute, because she works in the Ogilivie building itself and is a 2 minute walk from the metra stop. So she's about that mythical half an hour commute, yet is about as far as you can possibly be as the crow flies (20+ miles) for that speed of commute, unless you commute via helicopter.

blah_blah
Apr 15, 2006

Snevet posted:

I am living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, so maybe many of the things plaguing the American market don't quite make their way up here.

For me, purchasing a home made way more sense than renting for a couple of reasons: ... market rents in the area are substantially higher than a mortgage would be on the same property.

This is emphatically not true Canada-wide (in particular, it's not the case in Vancouver, where I used to own a condo).

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

LemonDrizzle posted:

The Economist has a couple of interactive graphs based on the Case-Shiller house price index that may be of interest to readers of this thread: US house prices and global house prices



The example of Germany clearly demonstrates the perils of excessive state intervention in the housing market: only very minor fluctuations in real-terms prices, with slow gradual price deflation. No fun at all.

I think a slight deflation in price/reasonable prices is preferable to current casino get rich scheme things like tax breaks encourage.

A home is place to live, not some sort of speculative things similar to stocks or bonds, "Prices can only go up!!!'

This makes me jealous, imagine being able to live in the downtown area of a cosmopolitan city like Berlin but not having to pay a arm plus leg like in the US.

Not to mention the wisdom of encouraging property owners to keep the rental market well supplied through various government incentives.

quote:

It is hard to quarrel with the results. On figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as $55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just $80,000. Broadly equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times higher.

A key to the story is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis. The ultimate driver is a central government policy of providing financial support to municipalities based on an up-to-date and accurate count of the number of residents in each area.

The German system moreover is deliberately structured to encourage renting rather than owning. Tenants enjoy strong rights and, provided they pay their rent, are virtually immune from eviction and even from significant rent increases.

Meanwhile demand for owner occupation is curbed by German regulation. German banks, for instance, are rarely permitted to lend more than 80 percent of the value of a property, thus a would-be home buyer first needs to accumulate a deposit of at least 20 percent. To cap it all, ownership of a home is subject to a serious consumption tax, while landlords are encouraged by favorable tax treatment to maximize the availability of rental properties.


also look at the size of the Irish bubble:

etalian fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Jun 10, 2014

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER
If German localities give developers permission to build so readily while American ones restrict it, how come Germany has managed to avoid suburban sprawl?

Blindeye
Sep 22, 2006

I can't believe I kissed you!

ShadowHawk posted:

If German localities give developers permission to build so readily while American ones restrict it, how come Germany has managed to avoid suburban sprawl?

Older cities, older development. There just isn't nearly as much room as the US and they had urban living earlier than us by necessity. The WWII came and bombed everything to rubble, making it easier to plan cities well in the aftermath. They didn't exactly have the incentive to build suburbs with cities in ashes.

Edit: Well if the city center is destroyed you don't start rebuilding in the suburbs that don't exist and there's not as much room for. They did good urban planning of their city centers.

Blindeye fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jun 10, 2014

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Blindeye posted:

Older cities, older development. There just isn't nearly as much room as the US and they had urban living earlier than us by necessity. The WWII came and bombed everything to rubble, making it easier to plan cities well in the aftermath.

The most sprawl-y cities in the US are typically those that boomed after WW2 though.

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

ShadowHawk posted:

If German localities give developers permission to build so readily while American ones restrict it, how come Germany has managed to avoid suburban sprawl?

More centralized planning especially for things like mass transit/new highways and also using things such as city greenbelt boundaries to prevent sprawl.

somewhat longer report on the topic:
http://community-wealth.org/_pdfs/articles-publications/tod/paper-buehler-et-al.pdf

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

computer parts posted:

The most sprawl-y cities in the US are typically those that boomed after WW2 though.

The US was rich during the boom, and most of Europe was comparatively pretty poor. Western Europe had to really pull together to rebuild, but the US could just gently caress around and do whatever felt good.

bryn987
May 31, 2014
Nice OP

I bought my first house last September and here is what I have learned.

1. The whole mortgage is rigged against the buyers and the bank makes bank no matter what happens
-Say on a typical 30 year fixed FHA, only like 10% of your mortgage payment goes towards interest. The deeper into the loan you go, it does get better though
-Mortgage Insurance unless you put like 20% down
-Foreclosure

So, the banks get a poo poo ton of money upfront in interest payments, they get the mortgage insurance payments and when they sell your foreclosed house, they get that money too. Hell, the banks don't give a poo poo if you foreclose as they make more money off of it if you do. When they sell again, that's more money in closing costs for them. If they can flip your house a few times in 5 years, cha-ching!!

2. Title Insurance - wtf is this? I have to pay to protect myself that some lawyer didn't gently caress up the title earlier? My house is brand new. How can a 3 month old house have a hosed up title? Why can't the person that did the title work pay the drat insurance to cover his work?

3. Realtors - can't say much on this one as I don't know the amount of work he did. I do know that I found the house that we eventually bought without his help. What makes me nervous is when we sell. I have to hope my house appreciates enough to cover their 3% commision as well as closing costs. So, if my house doesn't go up by 6%, I lose money when it's time to sell.

4. Homebuilders - they have to make the house as cheap as possible to increase their margin. Only way to get a really quality house is to have it custom built. Even then, you can't watch them all day long to make sure they didn't gently caress something up

As they say in my favorite movie, Casino, the whole industry is "Always the dollars. Always the fuckin' dollars"

bryn987 fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 10, 2014

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

on the left posted:

The US was rich during the boom, and most of Europe was comparatively pretty poor. Western Europe had to really pull together to rebuild, but the US could just gently caress around and do whatever felt good.

Also Europe was also focused on higher density development/actual mass transit investment while US basically went car crazy after World War II.


bryn987 posted:

2. Title Insurance - wtf is this? I have to pay to protect myself that some lawyer didn't gently caress up the title earlier? My house is brand new. How can a 3 month old house have a hosed up title? Why can't the person that did the title work pay the drat insurance to cover his work?

It's basically another kickback to you know who, only a few states such as Iowa which outlawed title insurance but later on made a state title insurance plan that only cost $100 for up to a $500,000 mortgage.

etalian fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jun 10, 2014

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

bryn987 posted:

2. Title Insurance - wtf is this? I have to pay to protect myself that some lawyer didn't gently caress up the title earlier? My house is brand new. How can a 3 month old house have a hosed up title? Why can't the person that did the title work pay the drat insurance to cover his work?

The title system is a mess, with no central database of land ownership. Anybody could theoretically come up with a claim to your land from hundreds of years ago. Title insurance makes a lot of sense.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

bryn987 posted:

1. The whole mortgage is rigged against the buyers and the bank makes bank no matter what happens
-Say on a typical 30 year fixed FHA, only like 10% of your mortgage payment goes towards interest. The deeper into the loan you go, it does get better though

Well hold up, although some of your other points are valid, that most of your initial payments are interest isn't some nefarious evil; it's just how math works.

Say you take out $200,000 at 6% interest. Your first month you owe 0.5% in interest, or $1,000. This is true in any kind of loan. After that, you pay off part of the principal, so next month you owe less interest. If you wanted to, you could instead decide to pay off $555.56 of principal every month for 30 years, which would pay off the loan in the same amount of time, but you'd start with a high-rear end $1,555.56 payment your first month and then your monthly payment would get lower and lower every month until your last one is only just above $555.56.

You would actually save a shitton on interest doing it that way, but most people prefer stability and want equal, predictable monthly payments, so you figure out how much prinicpal you have to pay off each month to keep the payments equal while paying off the loan in 30 years, and that number happens to be $1,199.10.

The reason most of your first payment goes to interest isn't because the bank is fleecing you; it's just that the loan balance is huge at the beginning so the interest payment is also huge the first few months. When the loan is almost paid off, the balance is small so the interest is small, so of course most of your payment goes to principal at the end. If you want 90% of your first payment to go to principal, you'd have to make a $10,000 payment.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


bryn987 posted:

3. Realtors - can't say much on this one as I don't know the amount of work he did. I do know that I found the house that we eventually bought without his help. What makes me nervous is when we sell. I have to hope my house appreciates enough to cover their 3% commision as well as closing costs. So, if my house doesn't go up by 6%, I lose money when it's time to sell.

4. Homebuilders - they have to make the house as cheap as possible to increase their margin. Only way to get a really quality house is to have it custom built. Even then, you can't watch them all day long to make sure they didn't gently caress something up

3. I have some bad news for you: when you sell you pay 6% to the realtor, so you'd need more like a 9% appreciation to cover commission and your just paid closing costs. The way it works is that normally the selling agent will keep 3% and 3% goes to the buyer's agent, but still all of the realtor commissions come out of the seller of the house. Nice little racket they have isn't it?

4. This is partially because the schedules have been shaved so tightly for each crew, even on a custom build. If the drywaller notices something strange about the plumbing or framing it behooves them to pretend they didn't see it and just finish the job. Bringing it up possibly means having the job (and your pay) delayed by weeks.

Dr.Zeppelin
Dec 5, 2003

It's not a scam but it is another front-loaded cost that really screws you over unless you plan on staying in your house for a long time and/or are willing to rent it out if you do need or want to move (which requires both a lot of capital and living in a good rental market so unfortunately it's not something most people can swing).

axeil
Feb 14, 2006

bryn987 posted:


2. Title Insurance - wtf is this? I have to pay to protect myself that some lawyer didn't gently caress up the title earlier? My house is brand new. How can a 3 month old house have a hosed up title? Why can't the person that did the title work pay the drat insurance to cover his work?

I wanted to cover this one a bit. I work in the mortgage backed securities industry and on occasion we'll have to look up borrow titles/deeds for administrative purposes.

Dear. God.

You would not believe how easily some of this poo poo gets lost. Usually things are okay since this is only typically is an issue in a default scenario. But if it does and your document custodian is poo poo then you are looking forward to an absolute legal snafu. So that title insurance is covering the "lawyer decided to light a cigar with the deed" or "turns out the land is actually an ancient Indian burial ground and you have to demolish your house" or "the original seller never owned the land, I did" scenarios which are bad news for the bank and the borrower.

Banks do carry reserves to address document custodian risk. It's not much, but they do carry it.

The reason the person filing the paperwork doesn't have to buy the insurance, if I recall correctly, is because usually the person filing the paperwork is not the ultimate custodian. And one of the things you want to insure against is "the custodian goes bankrupt and lights all their files on fire." If the entity no longer exists you're almost always going to have record keeping problems. The first thing to go in failing institutions are the record-keeping standards. I know, I've seen the ledgers of failed banks. They're an absolute nightmare.


edit: And to your first point, that's how amortization works. You pay more interest up front and more principal at the end to ensure consistent payment size.

axeil fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jun 10, 2014

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

bryn987 posted:

4. Homebuilders - they have to make the house as cheap as possible to increase their margin. Only way to get a really quality house is to have it custom built. Even then, you can't watch them all day long to make sure they didn't gently caress something up

If you can find one in your search area, an old craftsman or Sears built home is a great option. Of course, then you're dealing with a 100-year-old house and all the wonderful joys that brings. But these new homes look and feel like toys compared to them. The new stuff isn't going to keep its value.

Xae
Jan 19, 2005

bryn987 posted:

2. Title Insurance - wtf is this? I have to pay to protect myself that some lawyer didn't gently caress up the title earlier? My house is brand new. How can a 3 month old house have a hosed up title? Why can't the person that did the title work pay the drat insurance to cover his work?

Title isn't just the house, it is the property itself. Your house is 3 months old, but the land has probably been there for a while. I think title insurance on my house was a one time closing fee at $250.

Which I made the bank that owned the house pay since they had to delay closing to cap a well they didn't disclose, but we found on inspection.

:smug:

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

Dr.Zeppelin posted:

It's not a scam but it is another front-loaded cost that really screws you over unless you plan on staying in your house for a long time and/or are willing to rent it out if you do need or want to move (which requires both a lot of capital and living in a good rental market so unfortunately it's not something most people can swing).

Yes, that's definitely true, if you're not planning on keeping your house for a while.

Really, this issue just goes back to prices being so inflated that people have to take giant loans with very little down, and that's why you have to piss away so much money on interest.

Kalman
Jan 17, 2010

VitalSigns posted:

Yes, that's definitely true, if you're not planning on keeping your house for a while.

In which case, you probably shouldn't be buying.

Dr.Zeppelin
Dec 5, 2003

I have a pet theory that part of the reason the Fed will fight inflation at all costs is because there's so much money tied up in comparatively low-interest loans now (including but not limited to a boatload of <4% mortgages) thanks to the last few years of negligible interest that any extended period of high-ish inflation will essentially have the banks paying their debtors. Is there any legitimacy to this or is it just crazy talk?

Eyes Only
May 20, 2008

Do not attempt to adjust your set.

Dr.Zeppelin posted:

I have a pet theory that part of the reason the Fed will fight inflation at all costs is because there's so much money tied up in comparatively low-interest loans now (including but not limited to a boatload of <4% mortgages) thanks to the last few years of negligible interest that any extended period of high-ish inflation will essentially have the banks paying their debtors. Is there any legitimacy to this or is it just crazy talk?

The fed is currently in the middle of an unprecedented money printing operation and has actively been trying to cause inflation to reach 2% for five years now. So, no.

Usually the crazy conspiracies revolve around the fed actually wanting to cause Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation, so I have to say this is a new one.

Re: title insurance - as someone who has gotten an opportunity to see claims lists from a large number of insurance companies for many types of insurances I sometimes enjoy reading through them looking for interesting things that tell me something beyond what I get from routine statistical analysis. Title insurance claims are astoundingly insane and the legal mechanisms that underly property rights are arcane magics. Everything from a county clerk not signing stuff properly to distant relatives trying to dick people over to aforementioned indian burial grounds can spring out of nowhere and leave you homeless at the swing of a gavel.

As far as insurance lines of business go it's also a really weird model. Normally most of your premium payment looks like this (these figures can vary quite a bit based on the type of insurance):

65% paying claims to policyholders
20% advertising / brokerage fees
5% legal defense (either defending you or defending against you) and paying claims staff
5% general administrative expenses
5% profit (sometimes)

For title insurance, the claims and legal categories are switched: most of the premium is spent defending the policyholder in court, usually successfully. I can't really get behind the idea that homeowners, in aggregate, would do anything other than hire bad 1-800 lawyers and lose their homes.

I'm not generally inclined to get shot with my own merchandise, but in the unlikely event that I am convinced to buy property anywhere near my city I would never ever consider forgoing title insurance (if it were a choice at all).

Dr.Zeppelin
Dec 5, 2003

Eyes Only posted:

The fed is currently in the middle of an unprecedented money printing operation and has actively been trying to cause inflation to reach 2% for five years now. So, no.

Usually the crazy conspiracies revolve around the fed actually wanting to cause Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation, so I have to say this is a new one.

I was the impression that they were buying securities with the money they were printing so that the economy would be stimulated by inflated asset values rather than doing the helicopter drop.

Runaktla
Feb 21, 2007

by Hand Knit
Chiming in on title insurance bc I'm a lawyer (probate and estate/CA). If there is a forged deed in the chain of title then that alone can cause all future successors to not own the property they thought they owned. I know bc I prosecuted an elder abuse case and that was a main point. We won i.e. granddad owned the prop when he died and the future owner and lender's title insurance got dicked.

There's plenty of other ways title can be questioned without noticing anything via recorded deeds, i.e. Adverse possession claims.

So yea title insurance isn't just about lawyers screwing up or banks failing. Protects from all sorts of stuff.

Chokes McGee
Aug 7, 2008

This is Urotsuki.

SedanChair posted:

If you can find one in your search area, an old craftsman or Sears built home is a great option. Of course, then you're dealing with a 100-year-old house and all the wonderful joys that brings. But these new homes look and feel like toys compared to them. The new stuff isn't going to keep its value.

I bought a 100 year old home. Everything passed inspection at the time.

Both sewer lines were clay and collapsed within two years. The water pipes went this winter.

Don't buy a 100 year old home.

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

Chokes McGee posted:

I bought a 100 year old home. Everything passed inspection at the time.

Both sewer lines were clay and collapsed within two years. The water pipes went this winter.

Don't buy a 100 year old home.

but it's historic

Bread Dragon
Apr 7, 2012
Here's a fun one for the renters out there, care of In These Times magazine. The short version is that a bunch of the players behind housing bubble 1.0 are now doing the exact same shaky poo poo in the rental market. Any real attempt by me to summarize the article wouldn't do it justice, it's really quite jaw dropping.

I'm looking at getting out of Chicago, where rents are rising very quickly and where I'm tenuously taking steps into the world of gainful self-employment, to my old stomping grounds of St. Louis. My 2br here with my partner is $970/mo, and about $200 under market in this neighborhood. I was looking at houses in StL that are nice and in nice areas and the estimated mortgage would be $300-400/mo. I know there are unforeseen expenses, but I'm fairly confident I'll still be coming out ahead. It's an option.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747

bryn987 posted:

So, if my house doesn't go up by 6%, I lose money when it's time to sell.



What is this obsession with needing houses to make money? If I pay rent for 30 years I won't suddenly be able to sell my apartment. The point of a house is that you're using it as a consumer, you're getting a fair value for your money by having a roof and 4 walls. You get the same thing from a hotel but you don't expect to make a profit from staying at a hotel.

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

Bread Dragon posted:

Here's a fun one for the renters out there, care of In These Times magazine. The short version is that a bunch of the players behind housing bubble 1.0 are now doing the exact same shaky poo poo in the rental market. Any real attempt by me to summarize the article wouldn't do it justice, it's really quite jaw dropping.

I'm looking at getting out of Chicago, where rents are rising very quickly and where I'm tenuously taking steps into the world of gainful self-employment, to my old stomping grounds of St. Louis. My 2br here with my partner is $970/mo, and about $200 under market in this neighborhood. I was looking at houses in StL that are nice and in nice areas and the estimated mortgage would be $300-400/mo. I know there are unforeseen expenses, but I'm fairly confident I'll still be coming out ahead. It's an option.

Yeah the OP covered it, after the bubble piles of big money places like Blackrock bought foreclosures and short sales in places like california to flip into high priced rental properties.

Pretty much they hope to rent for a couple of years and hopefully selloff the houses during the next bubble cycle.

Also since the whole securization of mortages wasn't enough places like Blackrock and Deutschbank also created a new rental focused security to help feed their clever plan

quote:

Invitation Homes has called its investment strategy a “bet on America.” This may be a bit too much honesty, considering the financial aspect of the company’s operations. In October 2013, Blackstone partnered with Deutsche Bank to offer a first-of-its-kind “rental-backed security” to Wall Street investors to the tune of $480 million.

If this sounds eerily familiar, that’s because it is. Rental-backed bonds work essentially the same way as the mortgage-backed bonds that crashed the economy in 2008, except that they are serviced by monthly rental checks rather than mortgage payments. Other investment companies are now coming to the trough and preparing to offer similar rental-backed bonds. Financial analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods estimate that the rental securitization market could balloon into a nearly $1 trillion industry in the next six years.

etalian fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Jun 10, 2014

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747

etalian posted:

quote:

except that they are serviced by monthly rental checks rather than monthly mortgage payments.


Haha, that's just moronic, unless they can corner the market. People are more likely to pay mortgage (so they don't get forclosed and lose all their equity...ending up with nothing to show for the home buying, kind of like a renter) but renters can just move (if there are available units somewhere) and stop paying if it costs too much. Maybe they really hope to corner the market, but will the FTC get involved? (probably not, or get bribed to do nothing)

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

effectual posted:

Haha, that's just moronic, unless they can corner the market. People are more likely to pay mortgage (so they don't get forclosed and lose all their equity...ending up with nothing to show for the home buying, kind of like a renter) but renters can just move (if there are available units somewhere) and stop paying if it costs too much. Maybe they really hope to corner the market, but will the FTC get involved? (probably not, or get bribed to do nothing)

You don't understand how asset backed securities work. On a large enough scale, you can expect a certain return on rental income, due to law of averages. For attracting capital, you can divide up these cash inflows into senior (always get paid first) and junior (might get paid, but high returns) and have the underlying capital be the value of the house.

They aren't expecting much in terms of rental income, but using the rental income this way will allow the financial sector to hold on to the properties until they can be flipped at the peak of the market. Depending on what they expect the houses todo capital appreciation-wise, they can design the tranches and collateralization and cash flows to appeal to the different investors they have.

LemonDrizzle
Mar 28, 2012

neoliberal shithead
Ethical concerns about Blackstone notwithstanding, isn't what they're doing sort of exactly what you'd want to see if your goal is for the US housing market to transition to a more German model - large institutional investors moving into the rental market to increase supply and (ideally) bring a certain level of professionalism to the management of the properties together with an ability to exploit economies of scale?

Badger of Basra
Jul 26, 2007

LemonDrizzle posted:

Ethical concerns about Blackstone notwithstanding, isn't what they're doing sort of exactly what you'd want to see if your goal is for the US housing market to transition to a more German model - large institutional investors moving into the rental market to increase supply and (ideally) bring a certain level of professionalism to the management of the properties together with an ability to exploit economies of scale?

I thought the German model was the literal Apocalypse because prices might slightly decrease?

LemonDrizzle
Mar 28, 2012

neoliberal shithead

Badger of Basra posted:

I thought the German model was the literal Apocalypse because prices might slightly decrease?

I wasn't being entirely serious when I described a well regulated housing market with modest price fluctuations and gradual long-term deflation as a bad thing.

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VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

on the left posted:

You don't understand how asset backed securities work. On a large enough scale, you can expect a certain return on rental income, due to law of averages. For attracting capital, you can divide up these cash inflows into senior (always get paid first) and junior (might get paid, but high returns) and have the underlying capital be the value of the house.

This is genius. I mean, barring some impossible black-swan world-destroying event like people being unable to continue to afford sky-high housing costs if there's an ever-so-slight economic slowdown...the law of averages proves that the senior tranche can never default, it's a safer bet than the US government!

These C tranches though, ugh. But hey, we do have a lot of them left over, and if you think about it, the law of averages...

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