So the real question here is "which employees, and what did they know?". Or even better, will they be living in these condos for a few years, or selling them in 3 months?
The result is much less volatility on the market.
Really tired of the HN thought-police censoring ideas by downvote. If you disagree, reply and make an argument.
We shoud tax short term capital gains on property at 100 percent. Nobody should be able to profit by driving up the cost of housing.
Yes it is.
> Flipping is simply trading,
Usually, not: flipping is typically short-timeline buy-improve-sell cycles (that is, it's exploiting market irrationality where certain improvements add more to market clearing price than they cost to add.)
This does bring up prices.
The principle behind capitalism is that you create value and get a portion of the value thereby created as income/return. Land value appreciation very much doesn't fall into this category, unlike every other investment in which 1) the capital serves an allocative purpose and 2) is being put into productive use by someone else. Land value gains are generally extractive (and destructive, through the inefficiency it introduces) of the wealth created by nearby economic activity. I know someone who bought a bought a house in Beverly Hills in the 70s for $30k: forty years and a ~million dollars of value growth later, they sold it and collected four decades of extraction from the economic activity of the area around them. There's no universe in which this is sensible policy, and as you rightly point out, encouraging it through tax policy is even more insane.
I think it's something about homeownership that makes people hyper-defensive about this topic and unable to think clearly. I can't say I relate, given that my dad's career (and an outsize portion of his portfolio) in real estate doesn't prevent me from seeing the issue clearly.
Why should somebody not be able to take advantage of that? What if they simply wanted to move two streets over? But now could not because the somebody thinks it's unfair that housing prices whent up.
But your other points are messy. People in the cominity are building that value over time by being good citizens of the region. Had they been bad citizens nobody would have moved in and continued the process of building the cominity. It also cost a ton of money to keep your house in proper working order with also increases the demand and again raising the value of the proeprty.
I have so much more to say but I am replying on a phone and I can't stand it. Phones are horrible.
There is no universe where somebody could buy a house for 30k and forty years later be told even though they sold it for millions that they gave to give it all back - and then try to find another house for 30k. God I hope I read your post wrong.
This isn't incompatible with supply and demand at all, and from your comment, you don't appear to have understood my comment at all.
If someone wants to or needs to own for a short term, a sensible policy is to ensure that they don’t profit from their whims.
Everything else is censored by downvoting.
You need to live there for 2 of the past 5 years to claim your $500k capital gains exclusion.
Otherwise the normal short-term/long-term capital gains rules apply.
Also. I find no moral issue with this at all. Nor do I think it is somehow unfair.
Even so Jeff him self could and I think did pick a place located near some of his houses.
We really need to stop getting outraged when somebody else gets ahead. This is just pure jealousy and is very toxic.
Pissing I somebody else's limonaid is not going to make yours taste any sweeter.
Technically it's "securities," which is a broader array of financial instruments than stocks. But I'm not sure that real estate, particularly real estate that one might use as a primary residence, is considered a qualifying security with respect to SEC insider trading laws.
1) Trading on "inside knowledge" is not really a crime, or even a problem. Everyone knows something the other doesn't: thats why you trade on it. You sell your knowledge and knowhow.
2) Why do you think the employees of amazon are less entitled to that gain that the landlords or queens that have almost no relationship whatsoever to the company and have somehow a windfall
3) The ultimate loser of not being able to capture the externality value produced is the company, i.e. the shareholders. This is the other side of the coin of when amazon bargains for tax breaks: some people will be made wealthier for a tangential participation.
Are you jealous?
They could rent it out. If LIC is expecting an influx of highly paid workers, rents are bound to increase significantly over the next few years and if things work out, the condo prices will increase even more. Why not hold onto it for a few years collecting rent and then cash out with a nice long term capital gains tax treatment on possibly significant capital gains?