Want a House Like This? Prepare for a Bidding War with Investors
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Atlanta is very car-centric, but the Beltline corridor that surrounds the city is a pedestrian / cyclist heaven. Atlanta is already one of the greenest cities in the world - there are so many trees you'd be hard pressed to find a comparison. The Beltline exemplifies this - there's a park every single mile you walk. Businesses, restaurants, bars, and residences have sprung up along the entire track. Each bend has a bit of the flavor of its neighborhood. Entire weekends can be spent on the Beltline.
They're expanding trails out and into the suburbs. The Palasades, a hilly oasis by the Chattahoochee river. The Silver Comet bike trail even goes all the way to Alabama.
The Beltline has reinvigorated the entire city of Atlanta and captivated the minds of urban planners around the world.
If I had the capital, I would be buying so many homes here.
I love the Beltline and all that it's doing for my little corner of Atlanta, but I can't help but feel bittersweet about it. One of the major negatives besides gentrification is that it does increase car traffic. The neighborhoods are becoming denser and the new folks are still bringing their cars. Lots of people drive in from far lung suburbs to enjoy the Beltline and that creates more traffic too. Hopefully the model will be reproduced in more places.
I had a feeling the Beltline took queues from NYC’s Highline, just as Ponce City Market, Krog Street Market, and the new Marietta Street Market took queues from Chelsea Market (surprisingly owned by Alphabet Inc.). Turns out I am right and they hired the same Landscape Architecture firm as the Highline[1].
The sheer scale of the Beltline dwarfs most other projects. I was looking forward to the connection with Dekalb PATH but I moved to Cobb earlier this year.
[1]https://beltline.org/2011/12/07/more-atlanta-beltline-nyc-hi...
Our society is fastly moving towards a feudal system. It will not take long until everything is owned by rich overlords.
> Our society is fastly moving towards a feudal system. It will not take long until everything is owned by rich overlords.
I'm quite sure this was a known side effect to QE and governments dumping enormous amounts of cash into the markets.
(Ha ha, only serious!)
https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/11/the-rich-do-not-pay-the-most...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income...
Sufficiently little that they're still buying up whole neighborhoods to rent-seek on people's basic needs, so, not nearly enough. If the rich don't want to pay "all" the taxes, they can let us shift to an economic model in which they don't take home "all" the money.
If prices rise above the cost of building a house, you could make money by paying someone else to build a house, no work required.
Sounds like another effect of the way-too-low interest rates, and an interesting crisis to come.
This is all due to money chasing returns it can't get due to low interest rates.
It's an interesting securitization to be sure, but I don't know about this doom and gloom crisis scenario you are speaking about.
Long term buy and hold type loans meant for investors are typically based the on debt service coverage ratio meaning the tenant's rents need to cover the mortgage payment by a certain %. These are hovering around ~%8 which usually makes for a pretty thin margin on a cash flow basis. As with any investment, if you are banking on appreciation and that is all you've got, I'd worry. Perhaps not so much so in the booming area this article references - UNLESS funding dries up for all the hot commodities coming in.
I was looking toward to the low end of the market around the 140K to 150K price point. I found that I kept getting outbid by the investors. They would come in and offer a cash deal and a closing in 7 days. I just couldn't compete with a 30 day closing and a financing contingency.
I ended up having to up my range to 200K. Once I did that I wasn't competing with the investors. Which over 30 years I guess spending the extra 50K isn't that big of a deal. I still ended up buying below my means. However I know several who that would price them out of the market.
Even if there were a service that was "for the people" and bought homes for cash, the property would still have to be fixed up. If the buyer was OK with a fixer up property AS IS it is hard for the Investor to sit on that financing, they can't wait for 30 years to get paid. They'd have to sell the note - and who is going to buy it? Certainly not Fannie/Freddie depending on how "bad" the place is according to their standards. It's just not economically viable to have all that money in play even if the interest rate is higher.
"In Barker v. U.S., a property purchased solely to exchange for other property was determined to not meet the “held for” requirement. Accordingly, if it is clear the intent was resale and not investment, then the transaction is ineligible for a 1031 tax deferred exchange."
You have to live in a house for two years before you can avoid capital gains tax. Otherwise, as an Investor, I am paying capital gains unless I do a 1031 exchange (meaning I am just delaying the inevitable)
A friend runs syndicates for commercial properties like hotels and apartment complexes. His product is essentially depreciation credits, and buildings are like a byproduct.
My grandmother and mom owned properties in extremely poor areas, I remember visiting properties with each of them as a child. Rent would be something like $300-$400 per month and they could charge this because they owned the property for decades, the loan(s) were paid off.
I --could-- take a similar line with the home I am living in now, my primary residence, and rent it out below market..but why should I? I'm most certainly not a millionaire yet, and missing out on $300 per month that I could/should be saving should a repair come up is not ideal.
It seems like the consensus here is usually that "the market" is a good thing, and I am not sure why this case is different.
You can afford a free VPN or Firefox Focus or ignonito mode :) One is these should work :P
Turnkey investing - where companies have worked it all out for you and you merely deal with the cash end of it - is usually not profitable for the investor. If you hang out around RE investors, they'll caution you on how it seems very alluring because you don't need much knowledge and someone else is managing everything else. But these companies need to make a profit, and so you'll get less of the pie - and they have every incentive to make a deal look better than it is.
The exception is in up and coming neighborhoods.
The article mentions this, but doesn't go into detail: Many of the houses being sold were never on the market. Aggressive marketers contact existing owners and ask if they want to sell, and some small percentage of owners will agree (need cash quickly, etc). Had this not happened, the houses would still not be available as the owner did not intend to put them on the market. It's like complaining that I am screwing up the used car market by asking people if they want to sell their car.
When someone makes $40K+ on a flip, it's almost always the case that the house was in a bad enough shape that a bank wouldn't finance it. So once again, had they not bought and flipped the house, none of the people profiled in the article would have been able to buy it anyway (nor would they want to, being in bad shape and all). They're not stealing houses to make a good profit. They are making it easier for people to buy that house, while they make a profit. It's not a zero sum game.
Almost all flippers hope to sell at market price, and probably at least half list the house at slightly below market price as they need to sell fast. Why? Because most flippers are not using much of their own money. They'll get a hard money loan at, say, 10 or 12% interest to buy the property, and possibly also to fund the repair. Every month they have the house is costing them big bucks. They aim to fix and sell fast to minimize their interest payments. So it's not a case that they are aiming to inflate housing prices. Quite the contrary, it often works out better for them to sell it quicker at a slightly lower than market price.
Now when it comes to investors sweeping up houses and renting them - yeah, that could be a long term problem.
But really: As someone who has an idea on how real estate investing works, my criticism is that one can read this whole article and still not have much of an idea.
Here is where the article misses: No matter what, your numbers have to be right. I'm a firm believer in the invisible hand. If, as an Investor, you set your market rent too high - you may never find tenants. That's just one example.
Investors aren't the problem. Wholesalers (part of the group of Aggressive marketers) play a role in driving up prices taking aggressive finders fees (called Assignment Fees) for finding the properties for investors. Thing is, if they price their assignment fee too high, they may never find an Investor (flipper) to assign their contract to. Once again, market dictates it. If there is no meat left on the bone for the flipper to create their end product (based on current Retail comps) then they'll get stuck with the contract and a large majority can't close the deal on their own. Just join a wholesaler group on Facebook and you'll see the amount of inexperienced people trying to make a buck.
"Fix & Rent" is where the market is headed, for two reasons:
1. the market for single-family fix-and-flip projects is compressing, meaning the profit margin is getting slimmer.
2. the data points to younger people preferring to rent. my own opinion is that it points to them not being able to afford to buy, but regardless: house rentals is a big market, much bigger than many expected.
my take is that the main drawback is that within a certain price range this is bound to drive prices up, making it harder for normal people to purchase a home. and nearly impossible for normal people to find a deal.
Personally, though, I don't believe that younger people preferring to rent is making that big an impact. That's something you see in only a few cities in the US, and most investors who are trying to make money via rentals actively avoid those cities (saturated market).
I'm not trying to be hateful, but those are both very real solutions.
If the influence of NIMBY really was limited to the BY (backyard) these issues would be moot. The frustration is that owners are attempting to control land that they did not purchase.
Depends on zoning laws. In my state, this was not allowed until legislation came about this year allowing it. You could not have a multifamily property in a single family residential neighborhood - not even a duplex.
As more properties end up being owned by investors, the voting power of owners (as a category) is commensurately lower, since a single investor usually owns multiple properties, yet gets only one vote.
As the number of renters increases, they can support zoning changes that add supply and reduce their costs.
No, not HN/techy work, and no, not a job that has no benefits. A real job that will pay a mortagage. They just don't exist.
EXP: Get a clerk job in Norman, OK. Here's the indeed link [0]. Medical clerks are about as an average a job as you're going to find [1]. Look at that pay, it's $12 an hour, or ~$25k/year. Granted, these kinds of jobs come with benefits, so that is really nice. What kind of house can you get with the two of you working at ~$50/year? At best, you can get a $1000/mo mortgage, or a $150k house. Here's what those houses look like [2].
All looks pretty alright, yeah? Think you can make it like that, yeah? Well, the poverty rate there is 60% [3]. Yeah, 2 of 3 random people in Norman, OK are making no more than ~$26k/year.
So where is the disconnect? If you get an average job in an average place and get an average house in your price range, everything should be roses, right? But the overt majority of people in an average place in the country are making no more than ~$500 per week.
Look, everyone knows that Norman OK is not a place you want to live or try to thrive in. Oklahoma's educational system is ranked down there with Mississippi [4]. Ranked 24th is Ohio where they kicked creationism out just 2 years ago [5].
Moving somewhere else is NOT a realistic solution. You know that.
[0] https://www.indeed.com/q-Clerical-l-Norman,-OK-jobs.html
[1] https://www.aol.com/2010/11/11/americas-most-popular-jobs/
[2] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Norman-OK/pmf,pf_pt/33...
[3] https://www.towncharts.com/Oklahoma/Economy/Norman-city-OK-E... Look at the charts near the bottom that include the non-working poor, working poor, and non-labor force poor.
[4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oklahoma
[5] https://www.worldreligionnews.com/religion-news/creationism-...
I'm curious if the graphics team has some UX insight into this.