<story><title>Mortgage Rates Jump Above 6%, Putting Pressure on Housing Market</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/business/mortgage-rates.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Justsignedup</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also increasing a lot of supply. Without building.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem in the country is that investment capital is swooping in any buying any valuable property up and re-selling it for a lot more OR renting it out for a lot.&lt;p&gt;Because investment is just buying everything for cash, they don&amp;#x27;t really care.&lt;p&gt;We need a massive tax on investment property, something that&amp;#x27;ll require the house to become completely unaffordable to re-sell, so investing will have negative returns due to taxation.&lt;p&gt;Then suddenly a ton of houses will fly back on the market because investors will be trying to dump inventory.&lt;p&gt;ALSO property taxes can help: If you live in a house, your property tax is identical to today. If you don&amp;#x27;t, your property tax is say 10x&amp;#x27;d.&lt;p&gt;Being a real-estate investor won&amp;#x27;t be very lucrative. Meanwhile this won&amp;#x27;t affect regular homebuyers since they won&amp;#x27;t have this tax.</text></item><item><author>spicyusername</author><text>Bringing house prices down either means increasing the supply or decreasing demand.&lt;p&gt;The FED only has a demand-side lever, and &amp;quot;decreasing demand&amp;quot; is exactly equivalent to &amp;quot;reducing affordability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to see more attention paid to increasing housing supply, but that is a much more complex problem, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised that we see less emphasis on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PopAlongKid</author><text>&amp;gt;We need a massive tax on investment property, something that&amp;#x27;ll require the house to become completely unaffordable to re-sell, so investing will have negative returns due to taxation.&lt;p&gt;Or far easier, just eliminate the Section 1031 like-kind exchange (U.S. tax provision that allows tax on realized gains on investment property to be deferred indefinitely). There&amp;#x27;s really no policy justification for it since long term capital gains already have a favorable tax rate, and in fact like kind exchanges for personal (non-real-estate) property have already been recently eliminated.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mortgage Rates Jump Above 6%, Putting Pressure on Housing Market</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/business/mortgage-rates.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Justsignedup</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also increasing a lot of supply. Without building.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem in the country is that investment capital is swooping in any buying any valuable property up and re-selling it for a lot more OR renting it out for a lot.&lt;p&gt;Because investment is just buying everything for cash, they don&amp;#x27;t really care.&lt;p&gt;We need a massive tax on investment property, something that&amp;#x27;ll require the house to become completely unaffordable to re-sell, so investing will have negative returns due to taxation.&lt;p&gt;Then suddenly a ton of houses will fly back on the market because investors will be trying to dump inventory.&lt;p&gt;ALSO property taxes can help: If you live in a house, your property tax is identical to today. If you don&amp;#x27;t, your property tax is say 10x&amp;#x27;d.&lt;p&gt;Being a real-estate investor won&amp;#x27;t be very lucrative. Meanwhile this won&amp;#x27;t affect regular homebuyers since they won&amp;#x27;t have this tax.</text></item><item><author>spicyusername</author><text>Bringing house prices down either means increasing the supply or decreasing demand.&lt;p&gt;The FED only has a demand-side lever, and &amp;quot;decreasing demand&amp;quot; is exactly equivalent to &amp;quot;reducing affordability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to see more attention paid to increasing housing supply, but that is a much more complex problem, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised that we see less emphasis on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dec0dedab0de</author><text>I think I agree,  except I think it should explicitly be a vacancy tax. We need investors who buy builds to manage and rent out to residents and businesses.  Investors who buy buildings to avoid inflation are a problem.  I know many local buildings that have been vacant, but available for rent for over 15 years.  That tells me that they are asking for too much. They need an incentive to rent it out cheaper, or sell, or forfeit the land.  Most (all?) real estate ownership chains go back to someone just putting down a fence anyway, if you essentially abandon a part of a town you should lose the right to claim it as your own.   But I do think the local municipalities should make these rules for themselves instead of being mandated by the state.</text></comment>