Comment by afuchs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by afuchs | Hacker News Reader

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There's a dead comment later in this thread which using directed abusive language towards another commenter while linking to a Louis Rossmann video.

The video [1] was interesting, although the dead comment seemed to completely ignore the video's [1] main point, where Louis talks about a hypothesis [2] where in New York City there may be an incentive structure between real estate investors and banks which is creating a market failure. The hypothesis [2] is that a building's assessed value is based on the rental prices that the landlord asks for even if nobody will reasonably pay those rents. The hypothesis speculates that, if a building's assessed value is lowered, it could trigger conditions in loan contracts that penalize the landlord or investor. Because of this, there may be an incentive for the landlord to keep buildings vacant instead of lowering their prices to market rate.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfHQZj3_TX4&t=580s

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...

I am not a housing investor, but I see many misguided articles claiming housing investors are driving prices up.

The factors that primarily control pricing in the housing market are supply and demand.

In Seattle, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere demand has risen steadily but supply has not. This causes prices to increase sharply.

The solution is to increase the housing supply. If the government removes regulations preventing developers from building new houses and apartments, many more will be built and prices will drop.

Many young people prefer to live in inexpensive high density housing. I remember looking at renting an apartment without a kitchen (there was a big shared kitchen for the whole floor) and without its own bathroom in my early twenties. Monthly rental price on this is around $300 per month as compared to $1,600 for a single bedroom apartment. Why aren’t there more of these? Government regulation prevents them from being built.

Government permitting processes take years to go through and cost millions of dollars for big new apartment buildings or for residential developments. If we lighten / remove these regulations, housing supply will decrease dramatically.

If you don’t want housing investors bidding up housing prices, then allow the supply to continuously increase. This will continuously drive down prices and no investors will want to buy.

While this is true for supply, the same can be said about demand. Foreign investors drive prices up by seeing some other county's housing as an investment. If taxes were increased for these investors, or some other disincentive was in place, demand would fall driving prices down

This was certainly true in Australia. Where Chinese investors would get their money out of China and into Aussie real estate!

Investors don't park money in an asset where supply is increasing dramatically.

Exactly!

Here in Australia we are seeing remarkable growth in property prices over the last quarter!

Sydney prices grew at $AU1200 per day!

In the residential housing market there just isn’t enough supply!

I can say anecdotally that’s younger buyers are being accompanied by their parents, who are assisting with finance.

Its well observed that people are queuing down the street to inspect properties, and literally writing offers out on the kitchen table!

Properties are selling on minutes, with prices being pushed up by desperate buyers with access to finance from loans with low interest rates with deposits from their parents!

When you take a 20 or 30 year mortgage, what’s $20 or $30k here and there!

That’s what’s driving prices up!

Supply and demand!

It's trying to run away from inflation. USA and others have been printing outrageous amount of money, huge inflation is coming, sometimes it's already there. Solution is not to build more homes ad infinitum, but to curb the printing and get back to responsible fiscal policy without bailouts.

Two of the homes on my block here in an inner Seattle suburb are owned by Chinese investors and have never been lived in or rented.

The owner of one property owns 8 other newly built homes within the city. The 2nd property is owned by a person that has 14 other properties listing them as the registered owner.

I miss the people that lived in the homes that were razed to make way for these million dollar blights on the neighborhood.

These vampire homes just accrue damage (whether the glass garage door panes start shattering, or the siding starts going, or the owner decides the landscaping should be ripped out and redone again for god knows what reason?) followed by the sons or cousins of the property owners dealing with it a few weeks later.

No value is gained by these vagrant properties existing. Less people live in my neighborhood due to it, housing is harder to find, the city and county have less reason to invest in making local transit infrastructure better.

We need to tax vagrant properties. USPS has the data on which units are not collecting their mail on a daily basis, SPU/City Light knows who is not putting their trash out or using any power or water, and voter registration records are public. We could easily start assessing a 3 cent per square foot daily vagrancy tax until residency is established at the formerly vagrant address.

> The hypothesis speculates that, if a building's assessed value is lowered, it could trigger conditions in loan contracts that penalize the landlord or investor.

This is the issue exactly. A commercial mortgage lender will insist on a certain maximum Loan-to-Value ratio. The value of the property is directly related to the long-term income that it generates (i.e., the net present value of all future cash flows). If the amounts of cash flows go down, then the value of the property goes down and the loan-to-value ratio goes up. In a commercial loan, the lender can often call the loan due at certain times during the term of the loan for any reason. One big reason to do so is if the loan-to-value ratio goes up beyond the level that the lender was comfortable with. Refinancing in such a circumstance could be very expensive. Thus, it may make more sense for an owner to keep a property vacant and lose money temporarily than to take on a tenant at a lower rent and possibly cause the lender to call the loan.

I have heard this explanation a few times, but what i don't get is why doesn't a long term vacancy trigger an adjusted loan to value ratio? Seems like it would cause an appraisal to be much lower than just charging less rent and actually getting a tenant.

The present value of an income stream starting in the future at the established rate may be higher in some cases than the present value of an income stream at a lower rate that starts immediately.

Well, when you apply for loans the bank will want to know (and will send an appraiser) to estimate sales and rental values. If the developer's expectations on rental or sales income on a multifamily property are higher than the reality, and they lower sales prices (condos) or rental amounts, there's potential for them to get called to provide more capital. Because they may reappraise. What I've just explained probably has its own vocabulary I'm not using in the commercial real estate world, but my experience here is that my building has this problem and the brokers explained why they preferred to leave things vacant.

As it turns out, after 18 months, as the city comes back after the pandemic, the vacancies are now suddenly much lower. The building for 1/3 full for years.

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