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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

I assume that increasing the taxes would just lead to higher rents, right?

Which would favour people with fewer houses, which don't have to pay the increased taxes and so their rents could be lower.

So the 2nd, 3rd house taxes could be relatively low but for the 10th they would be ginormous.

There are very few people with that many houses anyway.

These people do not affect rents in any meaningful way.

> Small investors who owned between one and five properties held 87% of the single-family homes owned by investors; those owning six to 10 properties owned another 4%

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/real-estate-investo...

Possibly but it would also create more private equity reits that would build and operate these multi-family units. There isn’t a clean solution without making it illegal for companies to own single-family homes.

You’d have to have exceptions to that. Many new homes are built as whole subdivisions, then sold to initial residential owners. Banks won’t lend on homes they can’t foreclose on as collateral, and banks are companies. Mortgage companies are for this purpose the same as banks.

Some companies buy and update homes then resell them. They don’t all do a cheap flip with a massive markup. Neither do all of them hold them long term to charge high rents. That seems like something that should probably be regulated rather than outright banned.

Beyond single-family homes, it’s very rare for someone to build an apartment building with all of the units already sold. In fact, most are not coops or condos and are rented long term. Those rents also keep going up. A big part of that is how hard it is to get a new complex, especially a mid-rise or high-rise building, permitted to build.

Incorrect about the builders. It would force builders to hold capital instead of borrowing. It would make banks able to have an asset in collateral for the loan to the person, that they can then sell. Builders already cut corners to pocket money from loan differences, we should probably put a stop to that.

I think there’s a difference between a bank company “owning” a deed vs a PE company holding it for speculation and rent squeezing. You are right though that there has to be a system to hold inventory and we made Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac macro-economic instruments instead of those inventory stewards.

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