No one is buying new homes and then turning around and selling them. They would lose their ass. They don’t have a fixed price. Builders are selling each and every one for every dollar they can. Investors are typically buying distressed properties that the seller can’t sell and the buyer can’t buy in it’s current state, repairing it and only then reselling it. If they didn’t those sellers would just be stuck in those broken down homes forever.
There are some that do this, but having recently gone through home buying, a lot of them cover up problems with cheap finishes or don’t fix things correctly, then charge a premium
I flip items all the time, but they are items that very few people want, so I’m providing a service to the few people who need the things that I sell. If anybody needs any vintage vacuum tubes, I have several hundred. I have a Pentium III laptop. Good luck finding these things out on the roof if you’re looking for them.
So how much for the tubes
Tree fiddy
GAD DAM
What’s the point of the laptop?
Some need an actual old hardware for research, for improving emulators, for testing compatibility, for porting specific software. I would guess it may have more uses, but those are ones I know of. And for display in a museum, too
NASA needed 8086 chips till they retired the shuttle. They were paying good $$$ for the things as well. Dunno if anyone would need those things anymore at this point.
They aren’t manufactured, you have to buy them from people second hand.
I think they are specifically talking about housing as that is a basic need.
People don’t understand the difference between reselling and scalping.
So either all are wrong or all are right. Which is it? Cuz I know people who complain about house flippers, but are totally willing to scalp products like these.
Scalping is wrong, and scalping houses is worse.
No, all is just as bad. Scalpers are preventing people from getting things that they want unless they pay a premium. They’re not contributing anything to society at all.
The difference is want vs need. You can live without a ps5, not so much without housing.
I don’t know why this is controversial. It’s just a fact at this point.
It’s not scalping if you bought them on the secondary market, it’s hoarding.
A scalper too. 🤌
My opinions nobody asked for:
I really don’t care if people want to scalp non-essential goods tbh. It sucks but my life intersects with those items so seldom that it doesn’t impact me. I make a slight exception for things like electronics (i.e. GPUs a few years ago) because some peoples’ livelihoods are directly tied to being able to access those goods.
If you try to flip houses for profit, you’re neither a scalper nor an investor. You’re a sociopath at best and a murderer at worst
Perhaps we have a different definition of “flip” but the one familiar with is taking a home in bad shape then fixing it (usually yourself, because hiring a contractor would cost more than the profit). I don’t flip myself, but I don’t see this as a negative. Someone put effort to improve the house and gets profit from it (yes, there’s an issue that they might use the cheapest materials, because they won’t live there and just want to make it look good, but that’s a different issue).
The biggest issue in driving prices up is low supply and high demand.
We should change zoning laws to allow building more houses and also place restrictions on houses purchased by corporations and international investors. Oh yeah, Airbnb is another one that drives prices up.
The issue with flipping is that they draw from the same pool of housing as the rest of the people. If a party is interested in purchasing a house to live in and along comes a flipper and purchases it instead, the flipper will add on a profit for his service, that nobody asked for.
Presumably, the party that wanted to live in had already seen the state of the house and was prepared to pay for fixes. Let’s say both them and the flipper would use the cheapest materials and labour possible, levelling out the equation. The profit for the flipper has to come from somewhere then - something extra added beyond the labour and material cost - something somebody who would live there would not have to pay in normal circumstances. They do DIY to save on labour? Great - they can be contractors then, not flippers.
This means to me that flipper not only does not add any value to the house, but inflicts extra costs upon any good faith buyers. Add to that the fact that tastes vary greatly between people and they might actually do some damage by decorating or remodelling in a style thay may not appeal to everyone, or in a bland style. All of it could have been avoided if the flipper just fecked off. House flippers are like the people rushing to pump your gas for you before you get out of the car and then expecting a tip.
That’s today’s Lemmy Moment of the day.
Besides, don’t house flippers generally renovate the house, and generally make it more presentable?
See my other comment about positive-feedback loops. The House Flipping trend of the late 2000s was never sustainable.
On the matter of more presentable, I disagree strongly. Late-Stage Professional House Flippers are concerned with nothing but profit. The quality, fit, and finish of their renovations are tastelessly bad. In almost every case, I refuse to believe that House flippers do a better job cosmetically than if the home had sold to people who would be living there who would then be able to work with a contractor to fix up the house into exactly what they want.
Source: I’ve spent more hundreds of hours than I can count doing sub work for house flippers. There’s nothing defensible about what they do.
Source: I’ve spent more hundreds of hours than I can count doing sub work for house flippers. There’s nothing defensible about what they do.
Clearly there is something defensible… You did the hundreds of hours of work. And you can’t complain about fit and finish if you were the one doing the work.
I mean if you manage to make money flipping houses, go for it. But I don’t know how in the hell that’s possible in this market.
On a small scale, I agree. I don’t have much issue with individuals or local groups of people buying run down houses, repairing and modernizing them, and selling them on market for a bit of profit. But a terrible positive feedback loop has formed in the past ~10 years where everyone wants to flip houses^1 and no one wants to take a loss. It’s been terrible for lower income people who can’t even afford even the cheapest housing on the market. Therefore, it’s just easier for me to discount housing flippers indiscriminately.
- Read: painting walls grey, cabinets white, and replacing carpet with shitty grey vinyl faux wood flooring.
I have to disagree with the first part, the principal applies unilaterally. Second part, you’re bang on.
Appreciate the disagreement. Honestly, I just don’t care. I’ve basically sculpted my entire life to avoid high-demand, low-supply luxury goods. It just doesn’t impact me whatsoever whether or not two consenting adults want to buy/sell an action figure for 10x over MSRP.
Yeah I get what you’re saying. Here’s the thing though, scalping only exists in scenarios where there is a large difference between MSRP and true market value. That doesn’t usually happen, and when it does, it’s usually for a good reason. Like take concert tickets- most artists don’t WANT to sell to the highest bidder, they want all (or at least more) of their fans to have a chance. So, assuming there’s a reason for the price gap beyond the manufacturer being dumb, I think it’s a scummy thing to do.
I get what you’re saying and I don’t disagree with it, but it also doesn’t contradict my thoughts on the matter. I just do not care, like, at all. I have no strong opinions whatsoever on concert tickets being sold for 20x their retail price because I don’t go to those kinds of concerts and I don’t interact with the type of people who do. Its not a problem for me or anyone I care about, so i just dont care about it one way or the other. Sort of like how I have no strong opinion on bridge building regulation in Ecuador. At the end of the day, I believe in the agency of most consenting adults to manage their lives and decide between/for themselves what they want or don’t want when it comes to non-essential luxury goods.
yeah someone needs to stop the Chinese from buying property everywhere
No one should be able to, regardless of where they come from. China is a scapegoat.
Not a scapegoat but the current largest offender.
Domestic corporations outpace them by quite a bit. Even if you only look at foreigners, China only accounts for 13% with Mexico at 11% and Canada at 10%.
We should aim to ban everyone from doing this. If no one, domestic or foreign, can abuse of the housing industry, the problem goes away.
If only China is banned from doing so, the vacuum gets filled in the space of a day and the problem persists.
Op has right idea but terrible phrasing. Sounds racist (well, xenophobic) and I actually started trying to type a (tongue-in-cheek) racist response, but I couldn’t get the tongue-and-cheekiness strong enough to be clear I was mocking it.
Yes, we should ban foreign investors. Especially the US companies that want to profit from our housing scarcity.
Over here foreign investors are banned from buying property, they can only build property. Unless you send your kid to uni here, then it’s all fine apparently
And if we in the US tried that we’d be called racists. It needs to be done. I’m tired on not being able to afford anything
Oh don’t worry we still can’t afford anything. Median house prices are over a million dollars AUD and in terrible condition.
If only there were some sort of governing body that could regulate things like that…
Based
I think the difference with the first 5 is that a manufacturer sets the price, scalpers purchase it by that price and sells it at a much higher one.
The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the “investor” or “scalper” purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone (or did he purchase it from another scalper?)
Yes, the problem is the high prices of houses, but to reduce it we need to either increase supply (encourage building more, perhaps changing zoning laws to allow more homes etc) or reduce demand (increase interest rates (that though make it harder for regular people), restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
I don’t enjoy the whole foreign investor solution, I think it’s a scape goat.
It matters little to me if the person fucking me was born in China or 10 miles from me. Being born in this country doesn’t mean you can screw over the rest of the population.
I’d rather see hard limits on how much property one can own. There is no reason for anyone other than the state to own those huge apartment complexes. Dismantle the land barons class, no one should own enough to house thousands.
I don’t think it is a scape goat. For example, many people from China are not trusting Chinese Yen, they often purchase property purely to hold value and won’t even rent it to others, because it would cause wear and tear. So it is basically a wasted unoccupied unit.
As for your suggestions I totally agree.
How much property is owned by foreigners paying taxes while not collecting rent? That sounds nuts compared to just holding the dollars they’d use to buy the house in an offshore bank.
Americans do this with property too. If we only regulated foreigners from doing it, that would allow american investors the opportunity to do it more beduase they have less investors to compete with.
If you allow foreigners (keep in mind that those who do this, but only are very rich in their countries, but also are very rich compared to you or me) to purchase property now you not only have demand created by locals but you are adding foreign demand. This all drives the price up.
Even if Americans would do the same thing the prices would be still lower, because now they are out priced.
I think a less heavy-handed way of doing that is, every person can have 1 (one) permanent residence, and all other property you own incurs a much higher property tax. If you’re filthy rich and want a couple of houses, fine, but you’re gonna get taxed for it. But that will stop speculative house buying, more or less. Of course, this will never happen because states race to the bottom to offer low taxes to attract rich people. Another issue is, what if someone wants to live in a house but can’t afford to own it? Renting is the best option for a lot of people. I think that is solvable, but my idea would inevitably take a lot of property off the rental market.
Land. Value. Tax.
Value.
Tax.
It’s wild that you don’t see how exploitable such a tax would be. Specifically, it would make gentrification occur more easily and quickly.
If a developer became interested in rebuilding a poor neighborhood, their interest alone would dramatically raise the land value of the area. The now untenable tax burden would force the current residents to move out, and because the developer would be the only one interested in buying, the developer has nearly complete control over the sale price.
Developer is not controlling the price, they’re the highest bidder. It seems like a positive anyway - existing owners can sell at a high rate, government can get more tax, more tax can fund more support for the poor
The current owner can no longer afford the taxes and is forced to sell whether or not they want to. The developer can position themselves as the “highest bidder” by an extremely small margin over the property’s historical value, denying the current owner the windfall from the recent spike in land value. Despite the increased land value, no one else will be interested in purchasing the property at this valuation until the developer’s project is complete, as the project itself is the cause for the spike.
This is effectively eminent domain for private developers. If you’re a homeowner and you’ve been paying your property taxes just fine for the past decade on a $40,000/year salary, you shouldn’t suddenly become unable to afford to live there because someone said you live in a “hot area” or whatever.
Pardon, I don’t get this - “The developer can position themselves as the “highest bidder” by an extremely small margin over the property’s historical value, denying the current owner the windfall from the recent removede in land value.” - Wouldn’t ask/bid and transaction value determine the land value? Why does the land value tax increase a lot if the best offered purchase value will be only slightly higher than historical?
I think that’s what they are saying is exploitable. It comes down to who sets the value? Is it all just speculation. Speculation isn’t a price tag.
LVT is already a thing in a bunch of places… How come we haven’t seen these dramatic gentrifications happen?
For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They’ll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can “regenerate” the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn’t ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.
For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an “investor” or “developer” who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There’s no risk. There isn’t necessarily any work carried out. There’s no service provided. It’s just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.
It’s the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.
So the idea that “If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it?” Or “they paid above asking price” is wrong because I for one can’t afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.
This is how capital accrues.
restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
Agreed, we should be doing all of those things. Corporations should not be able to own any kind of housing at all, and multi unit buildings should be under non-profit co-ops.
And to penalize unoccupied housing, we should have a georgist taxation system.
I’m not sure I’d agree that corporate ownership is necessarily bad If you want to rent an apartment because you don’t want to buy into a co-op then how do you go about this? Someone needs to own the apartment to rent to you Personally I don’t mind if that initial investment comes from a person or a corporation
Could you rent from the co-op at cost without buying into it?
Who are you paying? Other owners of the apartment? So they put in extra up front so they can rent to you? If so do you get to pay back their initial investment over time? If it’s non profit does that mean they can’t take anything in excess of what they paid or do they get payed x amount over the top?
I’m fine with co-ops generally but when it comes to rentals I just don’t see how you’d make a “not for profit” rental But I mean if someone wants to set one up and prove me wrong that’d be cool. In theory nothing is stopping them
That’s how a lot of co-ops works. Or maybe it’s called non-market rental. I don’t remember the exact name but it’s definitely a thing.
Either way, landlord parasites are not needed.
The only time it makes sense for me for a corporation to own a residence is if they have a need to put up their own employees in that area regularly, or if I needed a manager living on site (like some storage facilities have). Corporations should not make their money renting or buying/selling single family homes.
I don’t think there are enough such edge cases for it to make sense for it to be legal.
If a corp needs an employee to be that close, then they should hire local, and/or rotate staff.
At a bare minimum, I agree, no corp should profit off of housing.
The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the “investor” or “scalper” purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone.
That doesn’t mean everyone (or people who needed it) have the ability to purchase it. The down-payment is simply too high that most people who want a house cannot afford it.
This is the same as scalping other goods, they have a unfair advantage in the market, and then they can make back all their money via rent and selling the house. They have nearly no way to lost in this game.
The unfair advantage is what making people angry; they are making money not by labor, insight, or even luck. The only reason these people are becoming richer is because they started rich.
They’re all investments. Most of these products are specifically setup by artificial over demand and under production to be profitable, basically exploiting the fact that there are 8 BILLION humans and a small group have most of the money.
Shit like this wouldn’t work in a stable global economic system that wasn’t headed for collapse on a bullet train
its called rent seeking for a reason
We’ll you see if you’re making people pay extra for their human rights that’s called investing. Not puny recreational items.
This is a joke. But it is a pattern I noticed in this sample.
Hia Ziglin. Actually You’re right; at least in the US, housing is almost unaffordable for a big chunk of population. (Living in a car or at Your parents place or with roommates don’t count much). We in the US luv paying extra (compared to most countries) for housing, education, healthcare, medicine, for transportation, dental care, for food 🥑🥝, water 🌊💦, electricity 😁🔌, telephone line (cellphone service) and the internet. However gas for car costs less then other countries. Hip hip h000ray 🙌🎉 I am Broke and I am Proud!! 🥲
Now when it comes to entertainment, greedy Corperations like Sony got You covered… They want more and more of Your money too. Remember how you used to play a lot of console games with two players? Now they want you to buy a second controller and maybe a second console. Think it’s plug and play cause it’s 2024?.. Nah, You gotta buy products that work with the PS5 only. But don’t worry Sony is making good products that will work with the PS5.
You don’t think people are actually going to read this with all those ridiculous emojis, do you?
I read it all. Why do the emojis offend you so much? They’re just tiny pictures.
I mean this sincerely and not as a hollow insult: you’re too cynical. Give the internet a rest for a while and get some endorphins flowing. You’d like it…and we’d appreciate it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/hvL-2TF9bLY?si=vJ3Z9vCjBbIwy8WW
https://piped.video/oxLKN2Ox9g0?si=q9giBZLl0NMKkiHq
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Oh no someone’s not gonna read my screaming into the void 😱
I need better marketing 😭😞
Hardly the same comparison. People buy houses when there isn’t demand and sell when there is.
No demand for places to live? Get a grip.
Touched a nerve here and gotta say I find it funny.
When was the last time there wasn’t housing demand?
Also big companies are now owning a huge part of the overall houses.
There are cycles of supply and demand in housing. This is as obvious as looking at graphs of house prices. So this meme is utter nonsense as is the conceit that somebody buying a house to sell it later is somehow evil or a “scalper”. Boo fucking hoo basically.
You could find out when there wasn’t housing demand simply by looking house prices in an area over time. If it flattens or falls in an area, then demand has fallen. And instead of sobbing that people richer than you can afford to buy a particular house at the market rate, you should instead be lobbying state & city governments to change the absurd building codes that prevent more affordable urban housing to be built that the suburban sprawl that afflicts most US cities.
Buying up enough of something so that you’re one of the only names in town is a “smart business move”, because then you can start to charge whatever prices you want. Totally not scalping. You see it in private healthcare, food, newsmedia, streaming, telecom.
Not just buying it up, of course, but making the market openly hostile to any kind of competition.
Maybe that’s through state regulation. Maybe that’s through some smear campaign. Maybe that’s through leveraged buyouts or vertical integration or just doing a little industrial espionage to fuck over the business next door.
Just ask Aaron Swartz what happens to guys who try to foster open-sourced alternatives to cartels and monopoly concerns.
Capitalism is both disgusting and predictable.
Is Cirno in high demand?
No fucking ice fairies allowed, bitch!
Whew, that’s a sentence you’ve got to be careful with
No but the cursed astolfo bean plush is
