I agree on keeping corporate purchases out of single family homes. In addition, I would like to see second home ownership limited to one primary home address. This means a married couple living in the same residence can only own one secondary single family residence. This would eliminate people buying multiple single family homes as monthly rentals and for short term vacation or Air B&B rental purposes. By limiting the secondary residence owner to a primary home address, it prevents the permanent home owners from using multiple persons (spouse, live-in parent, children) from being named as the secondary address “owner”.
It is unAmerican for large corporations to own single family homes. It is hard enough to afford a home in 2024. Even a two-income household has to spend more than 25% of take-home pay on a home. Competing with investment companies with virtually unlimited pockets to buy homes means housing is unaffordable for many.
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This should be a top priority of the current administration.
I agree! These companies with hundreds or thousands of rentals or flips are taking home buying possibilities from average working Americans. So many people have made multi-millions or billions on buying and selling real estate for profit and they should not be allowed to continue doing this WHEN the average working class Americans cannot afford a NICE AND DECENT SIZED home in a good school district. It is not financially plausible for a person making an average income to live in an average home anymore unless we are forced into a lousy area or school district. The house is either entirely too small and half decently constructed OR it’s completely falling down and requires tens of thousands in renovations added to the already extensive cost. The worst part is that these companies will buy it cheap (or get it off foreclosure) before the average person even gets a chance to see it, they flip it cheap and then put it back on the market for a 3-4 fold profit while normal Americans get stuck footing that bill for the full renovation plus company’s profit AND astounding interest costs paid to the bank over the life of the loan. How do you expect people to pay $300,000 for a home and then end up actually paying $600,000 for that same home just because the bank charged double the homes value in interest. Then even if you pay it off you still pay property taxes and if not you risk losing your home you paid over $600,000 for. Literally makes no sense. In what world can I purchase something and pay my life savings for it for 30 years just to have it taken away??? It THEFT.
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We are looking at making this a rule in our small town. Totally agree. Homes are to be lived in, not managed by people who make money off other people.
Blackrock (Blackstone) has purchased so many homes and apartments that they have become the largest housing investors which is a monopoly and raising rents that are out of control, putting many in homelessness., and making limited homes for sale. This should be illegal! Honestly I thought monopolies were already illegal, I guess I was wrong.
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It is time to not only ban mega corporations from purchasing single family homes, it is also time to force them to disgorge their current holdings. Enough of this nonsense !
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This policy proposal is a common sentiment. Some informational links for you.
Current proposals have already tried to tackle this issue. Normally we’re conservative leaning on the issues, but this one if implemented properly is supportable. As this is a summary article from a third party, they also mention various other incentives, which would only harm. The buyers credits are not fair, favor only certain groups, and feed tax dollars into the housing market which drives up prices for everyone. The point of the bill is to force select companies to divest from their housing stock interests, as this has severely disrupted the free market for housing and caused artificial scarcity and artificially high housing prices which never end.
This should get your attention. Please carefully read this article and links. Real estate appraisers have long since been aware of what is driving the housing market. FHFA & GSE’s have engaged in a concerted plan for a very long time, many years now, to automate the appraisal industry. Not only does this put 40,000 appraisers effectively out of work and destroys our decades long professional careers and the value of our hard earned licenses, which is happening right now, this also eliminates vital checks and balances systems which protect consumers from exploitation. They call it the ‘appraisal modernization program.’
Lenders will now self certify their black box proprietary AVM automatic valuation systems are being fair, you’ll just have to trust them. One asks; Where do these corporations get their housing stock from? That would be in part from the Wholesale programs where the GSE’s (fannie freddie) offer first purchase opportunities and repossessed properties for pennies on the dollar to only the most well capitalized corporations whom they personally approve for purchase access. Read up and click the links provided in this article. Billions upon billions upon billions of property, funneled directly to these companies, denying deals and discounts, denying fix and flip opportunities to all the regular citizens. Every single year the GSE’s release batches of billions of dollars worth of property and nobody can touch it except these first purchasers. There is your scarcity. There is your artificially propped up housing market.
And this ties into the clandestine welfare programs the FHFA & GSE’s have implemented which favor some groups of persons but not others, as well as causing a massive housing over valuation condition which never ends, a permanent affordability crisis. As investors hold the defaulted houses as rentals to infinity, are not subjected to regular market conditions like regular citizens, and with the new Final Rule on AVM’s, will be able to control the housing market through central planning and automation, as all the individual licensed jobs and oversight goes away.
Default rates of extremely delinquent mortgage lending borrowers are astonishing, yet hardly any of this stock presents back to market at discounted rates. This is because of back end loan restructuring programs made possible through automation campaigns. HUD is right now staging for a 40 year loan, only available to those whom default but wish to not leave their home. The irresponsible borrowers will get much lower payments than the rest of us and they’ll never gain any substantial equity. Loan servicers will retain them as customers for life, constantly resetting their loan terms to a fresh 30 or 40 year loan when they decide not to pay, and fines and late fees will be either written down or forgiven. All on the taxpayers dime.
Fannie and Freddie, by mandate of the FHFA has recently pushed new policies which allow for 115% LTV loan to value considerations with a 1% mortgage rate increase cap, for their severely delinquent borrowers, which appear to be one in ten borrowers right now. That means they get to bury credit and debt and their over priced housing purchase commitments (made possible by the avm system and elimination of human appraisers), they’ll bury all that on the back end into a new mortgage loan, and the people whom default will get lower lending rates than everyone else who behaves responsibly or is trying to purchase at current market conditions. This inhibits honest price discovery. Here is your artificially inflated housing market. Unless these policies are reversed and the people pushing this removed, you will be waiting for relief in housing which will never arrive again in your lifetime. These government sanctioned companies and institutions are supposed to exist to protect consumers but it appears obvious they are co opted, more interested in handing out special favors to insiders. Why would they eliminate independent appraisers, not share the algorythms for their AVM program, engage in central planning, reward poor loan management behavior and penalize honest savers and responsible payers, prefer special privileges for certain affinity groups but not others, etc, etc? You can read those policies here and here.
(40 yr loan mentioned on pg 80).
In the interests of ‘fairness and equity’, you will never be afforded lower priced housing again, and irresponsible borrowers will be richly rewarded for constantly defaulting, and they will not have to worry all that much about eviction. Higher taxes for everyone, forever. What exactly is wrong with lower housing prices? Taxpayers will cover the losses and costs incurred for implementing and enacting these new programs. Your tax dollars, hard at work. The PAVE task force made this possible by magically proclaiming that because white people are the majority worker type in residential appraisal, the entire system needs restructured because some peoples homes are priced lower than others. They’re abandoning FICO scoring in favor of a social credit score program and automated systems. You can read about these types of recently implemented patented technology here. The patent research on all the mechanisms which have led to the current housing crisis is quite insane. Once you become educated on how the housing system has been changed using these emerging technologies, and how long they’ve worked to implement this at every level of the system, you’ll never look at housing or lending the same.