I've been keeping an eye on home prices in my city (in the US) but it's made me realize that I'll probably never own one. Prices have gone up 20% just in the last year alone because of the pandemic, but that's not much of a change, because housing prices in the US have been increasing since the 1940s. Every ten years the cost of housing goes up by about 25%, which is faster than wages or inflation.
I'm sure this comes as no surprise to the beautiful posters here, because we understand that housing is a commodity in our society, and commodities have to give investors a return on their investments. I think this makes it easy to predict that, since the wealthy people who have the greatest stake in real estate always expect a return on their investments, housing prices will always go up, barring major economic depressions or collapse. It also doesn't help that for a majority of home owners, their house is their largest investment and a bedrock in their retirement plans. This is a neat little trick that the rich have played to get people to defend status quo policies that benefit the wealthy, like what they've done by pushing 401k accounts and eliminating pensions.
I don't have a point other than to vent a little. I don't expect any politician at any level to try and tackle this problem in the foreseeable future. I hate thinking of how many more of us will be under landlord rule, housing insecure, or homeless because capitalists value profit over human life.
Large corporations like Blackstone or large funds (hedge funds, pension funds) have been buying up housing. That's why you hear all these crazy stories of offers twice above listed price and in cash all the time. They've been buying up properties because they represent a stable source of income over a few decades (it helps that interest rates have been low and have no indication of going back above 2-3%) and profit has been declining in every other sector - they'll start to focus more on farmland too, I wouldn't be surprised.
These funds have so much capital that they're cool with offering that much money and either holding the property for 50 years with minimal upgrades OR flipping it after a year.
They're starting to "invest", read become landlords, in rural areas too lately, it's not just global cities like NYC, London, Vancouver, etc.
Neolibs will say you simply have to build more housing or get rid of zoning laws - of course, that doesn't attack the problem that large funds are becoming landlords nor does it mean that the housing developers will build will be non-luxury (every looked at housing or condo starts? It's always luxury) - and of course, supply is plentiful, there are more empty homes than homeless people, the problem is purely that a parasitic class is witholding people's shelter not that there isn't enough to go around. Sometimes, more Warren style libs will talk about increasing taxes on corporate real estate and on non-primary residence landlords (i.e. you can rent out your basement but you start to get taxed through the nose for renting out a house you don't live in). Reform, of course, will not last as the bourgeois need this as a sector of profit as every other industry continues to decline. Maybe they could get that for a year without enough loopholes that big funds can just ignore the reforms, but it won't last forever.
Corporate landlords/real estate groups typically expect a 20% yearly return on investment as well. So they often push out existing tenants to "flip" the rental properties at a higher price. It's pretty wild.
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they're doing nearly the thing as they did during the '08 crash, yeah. Slightly different things going on but same outcome.