this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 115 points 10 months ago (13 children)

I think the difference with the first 5 is that a manufacturer sets the price, scalpers purchase it by that price and sells it at a much higher one.

The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone (or did he purchase it from another scalper?)

Yes, the problem is the high prices of houses, but to reduce it we need to either increase supply (encourage building more, perhaps changing zoning laws to allow more homes etc) or reduce demand (increase interest rates (that though make it harder for regular people), restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Land. Value. Tax.

Value.

Tax.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (5 children)

It’s wild that you don’t see how exploitable such a tax would be. Specifically, it would make gentrification occur more easily and quickly.

If a developer became interested in rebuilding a poor neighborhood, their interest alone would dramatically raise the land value of the area. The now untenable tax burden would force the current residents to move out, and because the developer would be the only one interested in buying, the developer has nearly complete control over the sale price.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They'll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can "regenerate" the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn't ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.

For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an "investor" or "developer" who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There's no risk. There isn't necessarily any work carried out. There's no service provided. It's just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.

It's the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.

So the idea that "If it's so easy, why doesn't everybody do it?" or "It's fair, because they paid above asking price, you could just have bid higher" is wrong because I for one can't afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.

This is how capital accrues.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't enjoy the whole foreign investor solution, I think it's a scape goat.

It matters little to me if the person fucking me was born in China or 10 miles from me. Being born in this country doesn't mean you can screw over the rest of the population.

I'd rather see hard limits on how much property one can own. There is no reason for anyone other than the state to own those huge apartment complexes. Dismantle the land barons class, no one should own enough to house thousands.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

I think a less heavy-handed way of doing that is, every person can have 1 (one) permanent residence, and all other property you own incurs a much higher property tax. If you're filthy rich and want a couple of houses, fine, but you're gonna get taxed for it. But that will stop speculative house buying, more or less. Of course, this will never happen because states race to the bottom to offer low taxes to attract rich people. Another issue is, what if someone wants to live in a house but can't afford to own it? Renting is the best option for a lot of people. I think that is solvable, but my idea would inevitably take a lot of property off the rental market.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't think it is a scape goat. For example, many people from China are not trusting Chinese Yen, they often purchase property purely to hold value and won't even rent it to others, because it would cause wear and tear. So it is basically a wasted unoccupied unit.

As for your suggestions I totally agree.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Americans do this with property too. If we only regulated foreigners from doing it, that would allow american investors the opportunity to do it more beduase they have less investors to compete with.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone.

That doesn't mean everyone (or people who needed it) have the ability to purchase it. The down-payment is simply too high that most people who want a house cannot afford it.

This is the same as scalping other goods, they have a unfair advantage in the market, and then they can make back all their money via rent and selling the house. They have nearly no way to lose in this game.

The unfair advantage is what making people angry; they are not making money by labor, insight, or even luck. The only reason these people are becoming richer is because they started rich.


I absolutely agree with your solution BTW, just arguing that people scalping houses are very much brain-dead scalpers. Many of them probably don't even care about the basic human right to shelter.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Buying up enough of something so that you're one of the only names in town is a "smart business move", because then you can start to charge whatever prices you want. Totally not scalping. You see it in private healthcare, food, newsmedia, streaming, telecom.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago

Capitalism is both disgusting and predictable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

Not just buying it up, of course, but making the market openly hostile to any kind of competition.

Maybe that's through state regulation. Maybe that's through some smear campaign. Maybe that's through leveraged buyouts or vertical integration or just doing a little industrial espionage to fuck over the business next door.

Just ask Aaron Swartz what happens to guys who try to foster open-sourced alternatives to cartels and monopoly concerns.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 10 months ago (6 children)

I'm actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here's why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class "free market" bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it's an appreciable asset. I've seen these people my entire life. They'll decry socialism and make the age old joke that "socialism is when no potato." But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking "Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit" memes. They'll say things like "scalping should be illegal" or "the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever." Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn't directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they'd ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

It's free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you're imbecile.

Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.

You would say: it's a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What's the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you're going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.

So how does the economy even work if that's possible? That's right idiot - because it's price fixing and it's fucking illegal.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The incentive here would be that a new company could sell far more fridges when reasonably prices compared to their competitors and take all of their market share

But yes of course govt regulation is required when there is actual price fixing going on. I'd also like to know the alternative way of pricing goods/services from people with the alternate view

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Your goal as a company is not to sell as many, but to make the greatest profit. So let's say that the new market price is $3 000.

You're the new company. Your supply is 20 000.

Do you

a) Sell fridges @ $2 950/each, undercutting competition while selling whole supply, because of demand being higher than your supply, making $59 000 000?

or

b) Sell fridges at a reasonable price of $400, selling the same amount, because your supply is limited anyway, making $8 000 000?

The company still has no incentive to go B route. They only need to undercut the competition, not make prices reasonable.

Free market self regulates, provided nothing artificially screws with supply and demand and there are competitors. Both scalping and price fixing screws with it. It is literally the cancer of free market, and people screwing with it call themselves "investors", while actually destroying the economy.

It is the government's responsibility to prevent those situations before they happen, otherwise these changes may be irreversible.

Btw. A situation like this was happening recently in the GPU market. Nvidia had a crazy high demand for their GPUs because companies invested in AI were going to buy these cards no matter the price. So they bumped the prices like crazy, and they were instantly sold out.

Meanwhile Nvidia's competitor - AMD - didn't have nearly as strong GPUs for Ai as Nvidia. Do you think AMD's prices stayed the same? Nope. They bumped it just like Nvidia, barely undercutting them, because there was still demand, in fact growing demand, for GPUs for gaming, while AMD's supply was obviously limited.

2 years later, lower demand, GPUs actually in stock, but prices are still fucked (though not as much) because people got used to it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In this example this new company would probably sell fridges at a whooping discount of some 5% and still be able to sell more although the price is 1990% of the original

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This take is basically accelerationism. That if something is bad it will inspire more people to change their opinion. Your take is fine, I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

man that's a lot of words to say that a theoretical person is a hypocrite

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I feel like North America could fix its housing issue by simply abolishing the single family housing zones

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.

What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (14 children)

they could fix the housing crisis by regulating the market.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Zoning laws in the US are particularly fucked. This video breaks it down quite nicely, I find.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Here is the thing North Americans love single family homes.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Idk, its not like there's no housing shourtage/rant gauging in other countries with more sensible zoning.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I don’t know why this is controversial. It’s just a fact at this point.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

We'll you see if you're making people pay extra for their human rights that's called investing. Not puny recreational items.

This is a joke. But it is a pattern I noticed in this sample.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

yeah someone needs to stop the Chinese from buying up residential property everywhere

[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago

If only there were some sort of governing body that could regulate things like that...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Over here foreign investors are banned from buying property, they can only build property. Unless you send your kid to uni here, then it's all fine apparently

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They're all investments. Most of these products are specifically setup by artificial over demand and under production to be profitable, basically exploiting the fact that there are 8 BILLION humans and a small group have most of the money.

Shit like this wouldn't work in a stable global economic system that wasn't headed for collapse on a bullet train

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

its called rent seeking for a reason

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (24 children)

Just an inherent consequence of capitalism. If people are willing to pay much more than the price that was set by the manufacturer, it's their loss and a business opportunity for third parties.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Cirno doll > house

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