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Mr. Wynand posted:Can we see these sort of small-landlord rentals go up roughly in step with the rise in prices? (i've not heard of this) Isn't rental yield still pretty good in Vancouver? It seems like rents are high, which combined with low vacancy rates would make renting pretty financially viable, especially if you bought 4-5 years ago. Edit: Some quick googling shows some selected Canadian city rental yields and those are pretty good. Vancouver isn't listed, but if the returns are anywhere near Toronto returns, it's not surprising that you'd have a lot of people from Asia buying them up. With savings rates what they are in Asia, anything over 1-2% is attractive, especially considering that doesn't even include capital appreciation, which is typically how non-professional real estate investors pick real estate. shots shots shots fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Feb 22, 2013 |
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Feb 22, 2013 08:41
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Mr. Wynand posted:Yes, clearly we must let go of our primitive expectations of privacy and personal space and move on to this sort of post-modern communal living arrangement as a response to the rising cost of housing. It is clearly the best choice. Well other then bringing the prices back down of course, but why don't you try to just sort of change the way you live before we start going crazy with exotic ideas about affordable housing. As long as a significant block of people (typically unsophisticated investors who distrust other asset classes) view real estate as an investment rather than a consumption good, it's an almost unsolvable problem, especially if they have savings.
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Mar 19, 2013 09:07
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Mr. Wynand posted:Poppyock. You can fiddle with the regulation around mortgage loans and insurance for second homes (and first homes as well). You can build affordable housing. You can increase supply by increasing density. You can provide housing assistance. It's a perfectly solvable problem. 1) Many people buy homes with cash or alternative financing, especially in an international city like Vancouver 2) Affordable housing becomes unaffordable pretty quickly again if the market is moving upwards 3) Homeowners are voters, so the only acceptable intervention is intervention that raises housing prices. Subsidizing down payments: OK, Flooding the market with low-income housing in the immediate vicinity: Not OK
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Mar 20, 2013 01:19
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Looks like your economy doesn't have to provide high-paying jobs to support high house prices if you are pulling demand from a handful of strong economies around the world.
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Mar 21, 2013 05:11
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Baronjutter posted:If an economic system is producing results like this something is seriously hosed. Reminds me of how in dwarf fortress once you were forced from communism to capitalism suddenly half your homes would sit empty because no one could afford the rest/cost while the rich would buy up everything leading to tons of useless empty bedrooms sitting within a fort full of hard working essential people who were homeless because the economic system placed so many key labour jobs at bellow a "living wage" There's not a lot of really rich people, not enough to make huge dents on an entire city. There are a significant number of people with 500k-1mm+ in pooled family savings though. On top of that, many of them come from countries where financial products are underdeveloped and the one of the only practical ways to maintain/grow family wealth is property ownership.
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Mar 21, 2013 05:26
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Deathreaper posted:Exactly, The banks should have something related to this. That much money can't go anywhere without economic statisticians cataloguing it somewhere. Maybe not under housing, but you'd see tons of money coming in under some series of data (such as in balance of payments data).
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Mar 23, 2013 12:26
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JawKnee posted:So this author is okay with regulations to curtail speculative activity (at least in the short term), presumably because that results in a baseless increase in prices, but his response to complaints about this is to imply that people taking issue with activity in Vancouver are racist, or "you either believe in a free market system, or you don't"? Curtailing short-term speculative behavior is possible (high taxes on gains and such), but it's basically impossible to stop most of the other behavior. It's extremely easy to lie about property occupancy, and arbitrary restrictions on foreign ownership are bullshit at best and downright racist at worst. Vancouver is a nice place to live, so nice in fact, that they have attracted a lot of international buyers. This sucks if you are a Vancouverite because the foreigners are generally high-income individuals from top-income cities, and have more money than you to pay for housing. Hawaii is a great example of this sort of phenomenon. Not much you can do about that reality other than dissuade people from coming to the city.
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Mar 24, 2013 06:19
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JawKnee posted:The article posted suggests that most of the absentee investment is by Canadians - though Canada is a big place so to my mind there's not a huge amount of difference between absentee owners. While I don't think there should be restrictions on foreign ownership, I would like to see some kind of regulation with respect to people actually living in the units they've purchased, rather than treating them solely as a commodity, difficult though that might be to achieve. If there's any sort of monetary incentive to keeping your flat occupied, vacancy rates will plummet to nearly zero overnight, because it's insanely easy to fake that sort of thing. The only other way I could imagine is if the Canadian government grants out huge concessions of land to housing coops, but those have a ton of issues inherent with giving the right to make housing decisions to an opaque, unaccountable board. NYC has coops that significantly lower the price of ownership, but they have problems violating housing laws all the time, discriminating against race, religion, kids, source/level of income, etc.
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Mar 24, 2013 18:01
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Baronjutter posted:You could even get some economies of scale going where the city would be a big enough buyer of construction materials that they'd be able to get better deals with suppliers. A very large part of construction costs is all the red tape and design aspects (a 10 million dollar condo building might cost 6 figures in architectural and engineering fees alone). The city could have an extremely streamlined approval process, as well as design process. Could even look at some tasteful pre-fab or modular construction options. Just because the soviets built ugly pre-cast panel housing doesn't mean it all has to be ugly. This sounds all well and good until you realize that you've given a bunch of small time politicians total control of billions of dollars worth of economic good with little oversight. Aside from the "government hires workers directly" part, it's how things are done in China, and it has resulted in rampant bribery and roughshod trampling of safety and environmental concerns. Baronjutter posted:Why is the city driving down housing prices and putting private developers out of business a bad thing? Because many people who vote have put their life savings into housing. I think the research shows that people who don't own houses show up to vote at a much lower rate than homeowners as well. Baronjutter posted:Eliminate the profit motive, cut the red tape, have banks of standardized or modular designs, and we could see some huge savings as a society when it comes to housing. The building cost is actually pretty small for these expensive cities. Looking around, it's only $100-200 a sq ft to build your average city building, but value is maybe $2000 sqft and up in top cities because of land prices. Government would have to be pretty creative to lower land prices greatly. shots shots shots fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Mar 28, 2013 |
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Mar 28, 2013 04:26
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How is a system that implicitly and maybe explicitly disfavors immigrants and newcomers acceptable for a large, immigrant-heavy city?
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Mar 28, 2013 04:58
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Even if you just give certain groups priority in housing selection, and allow people to remain in the same areas by right over generations (the Vienna model), what do you think that will look like in 50-100 years? It's basically a direct road towards segregated housing and possibly ethnic ghettos.
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Apr 8, 2013 01:06
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jet sanchEz posted:Both Beijing and Shanghai have increased down payment requirements on second homes and upped a sales tax from 2% to 20% on all used home sales. From the BBSes, residents affected are already (hopefully joking) about getting divorced to bypass this restriction. http://english.sina.com/china/2013/0403/578326.html quote:Zhang Zhongliang, 39, decided to divorce his wife -- not to end their 18-year relation, but to allow for the purchase of the family's third apartment. shots shots shots fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Apr 8, 2013 |
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Apr 8, 2013 10:48
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Baronjutter posted:20 years ago a single-income family supported by a bus driver could afford a house that now only 2 semi-retired lawyers who were very wise with their money can afford. The city has always been desirable, population growth has been fairly steady, there's no actual shortage of housing as there's tons of construction. I'm not an economist but I really don't understand what could make the prices go up that fast and keep them up. I guess that's why everyone says it's a bubble since it doesn't make sense? 20 years ago, mortgage rates were a lot higher. They have come down from 20% in 1980 over time. If interest rates were higher, not only would mortgages cost a lot more, you wouldn't have money chasing returns into the housing market (which is also one of the few areas you can highly leverage yourself as a typical investor).
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Apr 9, 2013 06:14
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Fraternite posted:To clarify, if mortgage rates were higher, prices would be a lot lower because hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't be able to afford their payments and would be forced to exit the market, increasing supply AND decreasing demand. More can "afford" to be in the market now (i.e. can get approved for mortgages and make monthly payments) than if rates went up even a few percentage points, never mind 10% -- to say nothing about 20%. I can afford to carry a 5k credit card balance, the payments are only $75 a month! edit: But also, if bank interest rates were 7-8% and mortgage rates were 15%, you'd see that people wouldn't "invest" in real estate when they can get an easy 7-8% return. shots shots shots fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 9, 2013 |
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Apr 9, 2013 07:03
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SpaceMost posted:What are the meaningful differences between a $400,000 mortgage @ 10% and a $200,000 mortgage @ 5%? (pretend my examples are in equilibrium) Most mortgages are paid off on average within 11-15 years, so the extra costs due to interest are cut by a lot. Also, as I mentioned before, a big part of real estate cost increases is people chasing returns. This is especially apparent when you get a lot of immigrants from countries with poorly developed financial systems and institutions, since land is one of the few investment options open that is mostly safe from fraud and also very easy to understand. If you could invest your savings at 7%, it isn't that likely that you'd rush to buy a bunch of real estate.
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Apr 10, 2013 02:10
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Baronjutter posted:man, apples are in short supply. I'll give everyone more money to buy that still limited supply of apples. Those new apple farms are a blight upon my neighborhood and lower the value of my own Apples. This new high-density focus on apple farming is ruining the character and sweet charm of the apple farms we originally bought into. Fix this now or be voted out of office!
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Apr 11, 2013 07:41
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I totally agree with this; this is more or less the Swedish model, as far as I know. Everyone can afford at minimum a nice, big apartment, but every apartment in Sweden has the same front door. Can you explain more about this? Every Swedish person I have ever met has complained about the cost of anything near Stockholm.
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Apr 11, 2013 08:51
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Lead out in cuffs posted:As for how it's so cheap, I really don't know. Someone who understands more about the economics should probably comment on that, but I get the impression that there is a fair degree of government fiscal policy management to regulate housing prices. I also think there may be something in your suggestion of goverment supplied standardized plans and materials, but I don't know for sure. 30 minutes away from the city is easy to make cheap, especially if the train is a commuter train that doesn't make many stops like a subway.
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Apr 12, 2013 01:31
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Mr. Wynand posted:In realted news, hey look, a literal lynch mob: I didn't know impotent grumbling counted as a lynch mob.
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May 3, 2013 02:18
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