Based on the White House’s proposal, Biden and Harris want the capital gains tax to be similar to the tax rate on wealthy Americans, leading to Americans making over $1 million being taxed up to 44.6% on capital gains.
I actually don’t believe there’s any mechanism by which large-scale home ownership (one entity owning many homes) affects market prices, unless it’s so extreme that it’s down to one owner owning all the real estate.
From my macroeconomics classes (which were admittedly 25 years ago) I don’t remember anything about a relationship between firm size and the price of goods.
I think the thing that’s really causing housing prices to skyrocket is the constant artificial constraint on new housing construction, which causes permantly-insufficient supply, which makes prices high.
When there's a company with $1 billion dollars in cash competing with people's needing to take out 25 year mortgages at 5% interest, and the company sees it as a way to profit, the company will outbid the individual every single time and drive up market prices.
Individuals buying with the added cost of interest will never be able to compete with corporations that's have cash on hand and can make a profit by renting out the house.
The more homes a company owns, the more capital it warms to buy more homes.
You don't need one company in the country, you just need a few in a single desirable city.
Why am I curious about its real intention of it. If it is just for investment properties, I can support it. If it's for all homes sales, I couldn't support it. It would crush the middle class as they try to move up in properties.
What's being discussed by Harris/Biden is the upper tax margin for long term capital gains. If you sell a house and then buy a house, no long term capital gain there to be taxed.
But even if you just sell your house and want to go on renting for whatever reason not all of it will be taxed with that margin. Those margins apply to the amount of money that is over the cap for that margin.
For simplicity let's say there are two tax margins, 20% for capital gains below 400k and 40% above that. Then you gain 600k by selling your home. Your tax will be calculated like this:
400k * 0.2 + 200k * 0.4
So yes this might affect some house sales but depending on where that 44% margin will be applied it's only going to affect a very little percentage and likely none of the "low to middle class" house owners especially not if they sell property to immediately buy new property.