Aside from the leverage issues other point out in RE, you have to consider the political risk.
How safe do you feel that a piece of paper saying that plot of land is yours will hold up when there's a raging mob threatening politicians to do something about homelessness/housing prices/AirBnB/Asset managers holding all the properties?
The political risk in the West is at Emerging Markets levels. We've seen G7 nations de-bank their citizens extra-judicially, seize assets and remove licenses, remove freedom of movement, create an entire second-class of citizenship, lock up people for committing no crimes. This is normal. No one is protesting. The media agrees as does Hollywood.
If I had anything beyond my one property in which I reside I'd actually be pretty scared. This stuff happens in Emerging Markets all the time: the government tells anyone with more than one property to pick one to keep. All foreign property owners have their property forfeit or taxed to the point where they are forced to sell.
These actions are not out of the realm of possibility in the West any more, especially with the current leaders. There will be no tears shed for the poor landlords and property owners who can only keep their principal residence.
Sounds like a lot of FUD, the politicians won’t do anything like that because free stuff very easily causes divisive policies. What will happen, and is happening, is that more luxury housing is being built and less code ( regulations ) implemented. So the result is more inventory, which puts pressure on housing. Also there’s a LOT of vacant homes which have high carrying costs; eventually those owners will get margin called and have to either rent them out or sell them, which will put even more pressure. So I agree with the ends of your thesis, but not the means.
The entire reason that leveraging up real estate 5x is a widely accepted practice is that you can't get margin called as long as you keep making payments. Reg T margin will margin call you if you go under 25-50% equity, but mortgages will never margin call you.
I meant "margin called" figuratively, not literally. Essentially investors will start seeing negative cap rates and either demand redemptions or will start liquidating their RE portfolios, which isn't a real margin call, but "margin call" is a convenient term for what's happening.
Also, carrying costs of vacant properties are high. I'm predicting large writedowns of RE, and especially commercial RE in the coming 5 years.
This is absolute nonsense. Ocasio-Cortez is not far off of a bog-standard social democrat and she would be at best boring almost anywhere else in the industrialized West. (Maybe not "making majority policy", but not controversial.)
I can’t tell you how much I hope they crack down on people owning multiple houses. It’s just criminal. Not only do they own two houses but instead of renting it at market rate they put it on Airbnb an inflated price three or four fold.
The truth is under capitalism everyone cannot be a Capitalist. Please, I need you to think deeply about that last sentence. It’s not as simplistic as it sounds.
Until we treat housing as a cost and not an investment none of this will end.
They own the politicians. Its our fault. Turnout in primaries are very low, people don't even know their representatives. Its hard enough with all the tactics used to suppress candidates/prevent voting but until this changes then policy won't change.
As per some recent estimates SF commercial vacancy is over 2M sqft - this roughly translates to 2000 full apartments - more if we build dorm-rooms. We have a similar situation in other parts of CA. Is there any reason why we cannot solve homelessness by re-zoning these to temporarily to house them? Post COVID, people returning to office will be fewer. In addition if there is a recession, there will be fewer companies as well.
How safe do you feel that a piece of paper saying that plot of land is yours will hold up when there's a raging mob threatening politicians to do something about homelessness/housing prices/AirBnB/Asset managers holding all the properties?
The political risk in the West is at Emerging Markets levels. We've seen G7 nations de-bank their citizens extra-judicially, seize assets and remove licenses, remove freedom of movement, create an entire second-class of citizenship, lock up people for committing no crimes. This is normal. No one is protesting. The media agrees as does Hollywood.
If I had anything beyond my one property in which I reside I'd actually be pretty scared. This stuff happens in Emerging Markets all the time: the government tells anyone with more than one property to pick one to keep. All foreign property owners have their property forfeit or taxed to the point where they are forced to sell.
These actions are not out of the realm of possibility in the West any more, especially with the current leaders. There will be no tears shed for the poor landlords and property owners who can only keep their principal residence.