Comment by loglog 2 days ago
"Private equity generating rental income" is a lie fed you by the rich lobby. The real reason (everywhere in US and Europe) is zoning, which is a subsidy to the owners of existing buildings at the cost of everyone else.
No, it isn't.
1/3 of the houses bought in the US are bought by these kinds of organizations. Zoning might matter, but large capital owners are buying up a large fraction of the houses that are for sale and this is obviously driving up prices.
That's not true: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up...
Excerpts:
Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025.
Institutional investors are selling more homes than they buy and have been for six consecutive quarters.
While large institutional investors continue to get most of the headlines in the single-family rental space, small investors account for more than 90% of the market. These are individuals owning 10 properties or less. The largest investors, those with 1,000 or more properties, make up just 2% of all investor-owned homes.
That is the same source as I read, but
>Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025.
is, as I view things, what I said. You may say that individual real estate investors are not typically large capital owners, but that's a definitional thing, or a matter of assessment that isn't interesting to debate.
No matter how you choose to define it, investors buying homes are buying a substantial fraction of the homes on the market (1/3) and presumably have a substantial effect on prices.
"Definitional things" are often pretty important to productive discourse, and both of the recent comments you responded to with your assertion that "these kinds of organizations" are buying up 1/3rd of homes were clearly talking about large institutional investors, not some guy who owns a few rental homes.
Calling it a "subsidy for existing owners" is a slighty of hand that avoids blaming the literal hordes of useful idiots who are happy to see all manner of asinine provisions written into the zoning code to cater to their interest, whatever that may be. If it were just property owners it wouldn't have gotten done. It's busybodies, environmentalists, moralizing jerks, etc, etc that provide the necessary political will.
> The real reason (everywhere in US and Europe) is zoning
This is a lie fed to you by the rich lobby. Destroying zoning would launch the value of the land current owners have into the stratosphere.
Zoning change would spike land value in more populated area much more closely located to metro center, but it will depress demand on locations further away from the urban center.