• jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    55 seconds ago

    This is absolutely terrible for working people and the economy as a whole. Gatekeeping which ultimately brings down everyone including the investors who hold it above the heads of others.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    14 hours ago

    So can we stop this? Please?

    Investors should NOT be allowed to own houses, period. People should own houses. I don’t care if a few people have more than one house and rent that out, small time land lords are fine.

    These investment companies are the worst and they destroy everything they touch, everything is immediately scorched earth. Meanwhile we’re in a very preventable global housing crisis, but hey, let’s sell homes to investment companies, because what could possibly go wrong?

  • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    I get letters from realtors asking me to sell mine to their “client”. I’m sure they are investors so they can fuck off. I’ll take less money to make sure a family gets my house when sell.

    • cmbabul@slrpnk.net
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      15 hours ago

      I get emails and scam phone calls asking me to sell the last house my parents owned when I lived there, they sold that property 4 years ago

  • minorkeys@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Poor people can’t buy homes and those investors are the same people who make everyone else poor.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      This isn’t the rich, that’s what makes it so sad. These funds are managed by vultures, yes, but these portfolios are quickly bundled and turned into financial instruments, which in turn portions of them are rolled into other funds, which in turn are sold to groups like teachers pension funds, or fractions sold on Robinhood using fancy names that disguise what is in them. These funds are sold not to the rich but to those trying to stay ahead of the meat grinder that is the American capitalist economy. The rich get fees that are completely divorced from how well the funds perform, meanwhile working folk are inadvertently funding and fueling the machine that is making it impossible for them to afford to buy a home.

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          Yeah, that too, but my complaint is about the system that makes the rich while simultaneously convincing us to inadvertently participate in and strengthen our own economic slavery.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        Should 10x property taxes on non-primary-residences, and split the proceeds between subsidizing construction of new housing and being distributed as a UBI. Would be better than trying to ban speculative investment in housing outright, because it would be attacking the underlying market factors instead of telling investors they can’t try to make a profit.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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          1 day ago

          not only that, place limits on how many properties they can own as well, plus also close loopholes like using LLC / some kind of other shady company to buy more houses.

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            That’s closer to trying to ban speculative investment. I guess my opinion on this is just that this type of approach won’t work as well, because keeping people from participating in the market isn’t a direct way to move the market. And what needs to happen is, lower housing prices and regular people having greater proportional purchasing power, so the best focus would be to give investors strong incentives to sell, increase supply, and redistribute wealth, in a way that’s easy to enforce.

  • magiccupcake@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    While these investors are absolutely soulless and deserve to be called out, there’s another aspect of this problem that I feel doesn’t get talked about enough.

    If we just built enough housing this problem would go away. And it would be easy if we had a system that allowed people to build new things and undercut competition. But we can’t because regulations make it nearly impossible to make anything other than houses.

    People investing on houses are a symptom of the larger overall problem, of there not being enough fucking housing.

    • Best_Jeanist@discuss.online
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      1 day ago

      No. Nobody needs a Bitcoin to live, and Bitcoins are still expensive. We have more houses than we need, and housing is expensive. That’s because they’re both being used as ponzi schemes.

      • magiccupcake@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        That’s kinda exactly my point? If someone could print a fuckton of new bitcoins it’s value would drop. The same is true for housing. We may have technically enough housing for everyone, but that means nothing if that housing is not also where people want to or need to live.