Early mornings and early evenings when the sun is low you can see straight through the sky rises observe all of the empty floors with no people or furniture. I don’t know if it’s landlords holding space off the market, businesses that went remote but are holding on to the space until their leases expire, or foreign investors who bought real estate and never occupied it, but a lot of NYC is obviously empty so it doesn’t make that rents are at an all time high. As soon as my kid graduates I’m out of here and when I’m gone I’ll never be able to come back because market rate for apartments is twice what I’m paying now.
It’s a global epidemic - wealthy people hoarding housing. I don’t even understand what’s their long term goal. In my city in India, there are super expensive luxury apartments that have like 10% occupancy rate. The rest have been sold out but empty for years.
Locals can’t afford to buy them (each apartment costs around $2M to buy, $10k/m to rent) and there’s not even any price appreciation because everyone prefers buying new apartments here.
Yet the price remains static or even marginally up.
It’s almost like the wealthy buy and forget million dollar apartments, like you and I would buy and forget a $1 pen.
> It’s almost like the wealthy buy and forget million dollar apartments, like you and I would buy and forget a $1 pen.
Quite the opposite. They bought the apartment for 1 million, with a mortgage. They can't get offers for them. So now they can either get the apartments occupied, which means accepting the loss or go on pretending there is no loss.
But if you think this is about perception, you're wrong. Take the 2 options:
1) sell/rent/... for significantly below the "planned" value. This sets the value of the property. Let's say the property is now $500k. Now they have to pay $500k.
2) leave the property unoccupied. This costs them, say, $5k per month, worst case, and this can be improved quite a bit, especially if you are the developer of the property.
You can bet your firstborn they're going to choose option 2 for at least a year before admitting defeat.
Keep in mind that this is mostly not about individual rich people, but about large companies. Property developers and financial institutions are doing this, largely not "rich people". It's investors, not using their own money but your pension fund, who are unwilling to tell their managers what's happening. And so they all "conspire" to make this happen. Conspire should be between quotes because it's not like there's a secret meeting where they made this happen. Oh, and because it's largely your pension fund that's providing the money in here they have a large degree of cooperation from the government. The government can either cooperate or tell you you'll be working until you're 80 years old.
A solution for this is a large pulse of inflation.
