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Where are the homes? Glaring need for housing construction underlined by Century 21 CEO

apnews.com Where are the homes? Glaring need for housing construction underlined by Century 21 CEO

The highest mortgage rates in more than two decades are keeping many prospective homebuyers out of the market and discouraging homeowners who locked in ultra-low rates from listing their home for sale.

The dearth of available properties is propping up prices even as sales of previously occupied U.S. homes have slumped 21% through the first eight months of this year.

The combination of elevated rates and low home inventory has worsened the affordability crunch. Where does that leave homebuyers, given that some economists project that the average rate on a 30-year mortgage is unlikely to ease below 7% before next year?

36 comments

The issue is not the number of houses, it's who owns them. There are 16 million houses with nobody living in them because private investors are buying them purely as an investment.
- Where are those houses? Nowhere anyone wants to live
  
  That's fine, there are other homebuyers than you
  
  That's not true at all. Most of the houses are in prime areas, otherwise they would be bad investments for the people buying them.
  
  Nobody wants to live on the streets usually either?
I work for a building materials supplier. Among our renovation clients (not new builds), Almost all of their names end in LLC. That’s who is buying them. Companies, foreign investors, landlords.

Solution: ban companies from owning single family homes, ban foreign ownership of residential property, ban individuals from owning more than 2 homes—and heavily tax rental income at 50%.
- Heavily taxing rental income raises rents. Not a good move.
  
  The answer is, and you personally will love this, to build a shitload more homes. End single-family zoning outright, nationwide. Let people build, and they will build
  
  It would encourage things like renter owned co-ops, and discourage things like LLCs owning a shitload of apartments.
  
  What prevents companies from buying them all?
  
  Zoning is local, you might as well invite pigs to fly
Corporate landlords are sucking all the inventory out of the market and allowing empty homes and property taxes to go to waste while homeless Americans suffer so they can raise your rent.
There's also a general lack of building trades workers and contractors. The US wasn't really keeping up with demand pre-covid and they year of no work and shortages made the problem worse.
- They exist. But that requires adequate pay.
Ban zoning

36 comments