Comment by MBCook

I wonder about that.

If someone’s a billionaire and wants to play around by buying houses? Is that any better than an investment company doing it for the market?

How do you tell the difference between a rich person buying their third vacation home and buying a house they intend to sell for profit in a year or two through speculation?

Of course, on the other side, I’m aware of companies that own some company housing to let their employees use. How do you tell that from investing?

Maybe since they weren’t really doing it to make money they wouldn’t really care that the tax would be high when they sold it if they made a big profit.

It all gets really sticky. No special taxes gains on your primary residence, may be a lower tax (that 75% of what’s er) on a secondary residence.

But pretty quickly if you have that many houses personally you can probably afford to pay a high tax on gains. You’re not really what we want to optimize the market for anyway.

I just guessed at a big number. Maybe it should be 50%. Maybe it should be 90%. I have no idea. It seems like it should be legal, there have got to be cases where it might be useful. Buying and flipping houses from dilapidated neighborhood by turning it into something better.

I’m at the age where I wouldn’t mind a house. But they’re all gigantic, expensive, or both in my area. I have no idea how a normal family is ever supposed to afford one.