Show HN: I built an extension for analyzing rental properties in Zillow (homescope.io)

using homes an investment leads to hoarding of resources.

Why does america have more empty homes than homeless people? Markets have failed because they're chasing imaginary rental demand instead of adapting to real demand.

If people could only own 1 residential property at a time this would not be an issue and the whole program thecalebf built would not be needed.

the program you built helps exacerbate a social ill, and while it's great technically it's horrible socially.

I hope this feedback helps you pivot to solve the more pressing problem in real estate.

https://pestakeholder.org/news/house-hoarders-private-equity...

if there were no landlords people would still have 1 home and builders would get hired by the homeowner who could finally afford homeownership.

We have more empty homes in America than homeless people.

The market is not working because its failing to respond to the demand of more than 90% of the population for affordable housing despite us having more supply of housing than homeless people in need.

That's a shocking figure, but there's multiple factors that makes it misleadingly shocking:

1. The $50B was raised over the last 5 years. The amount of cash they have sitting around to actually buy houses is much less.

2. I'm presuming that by "many housing markets" you mean different cities. Presumably the fund is interested in buying properties across the country, so it's not too surprising that the same amount of money can buy all the houses if they concentrated purchasing in a few select cities. It's like arguing that your local school district consumes too much food by pointing out that they can "buy up literally all the inventory for many supermarkets combined". That might be true, but it doesn't give me much information about scale.

3. The WSJ article says that fund buys "rental-apartment buildings, warehouses, office buildings, casinos and other property types". Comparing a pot of money designated for multiple purposes, against a subset of purposes is misleading.

> That's uncalled for.

Don't care.

> You're letting your envy through.

It's not envy. It's watching rampant real estate speculation, hoarding of properties by landlords--big and small--and the four-generations-and-counting idea that owning housing is the only "stable" asset in this country turn my city into a place where my adult kids can't afford to live, many of my friends have had to move away, and largely the only people populating many of the neighborhoods around me are from the mono-tech-culture.

All while the crisis of housing people who need it yet who have fallen off of the increasingly-shaky bottom rung of society continues unabated.

It's fucking terrible and I don't really have a spare thought for anyone who insists "oh, exploiting real estate, that's how I'm going to make money" is their way out. I reserve the right to think and express the idea that it's morally wrong and that tools that enable that behavior are, by equivalence, also wrong.

(Before someone says: "Well, your city could just zone for more housing." They could, but that a large quantity of "net worth" is wrapped up in people's housing makes that almost impossible from a political perspective. So we wind up with nothing but rented apartments next to loud arterials, safely away from the areas where the people who can afford to live or who have lucked into generationally living in detached housing are living.)

According to Zillow, my home -- which I own -- has gone up in value by nearly 50% in the last three years. Good for me I guess, but not good for people who are trying to rent or buy their first home. And I'm not even sure it's good for me -- long term, I want to live in a neighborhood where not everyone is rich.

You’re right about your liabilities. Repairs, etc. Most landlords don’t go so far. When I was renting for 20 years, I only had one landlord that offered to do repairs. All the rest of them said for me to do it and they’ll reimburse me which led to a bunch of back and forth as to why it broke and who was “at fault”.

I grew up poor. My family didn’t own a home. It took me until I was 40 to be able to save enough for 20% down.

Just be honest. You bought an asset you expect to increase in value, and renting allows you an easy manner to pay for that. If you’re renting at current market rates, which have screwed over current renter’s savings in almost every market in the country, you’re likely contributing to this family’s lack of savings. (Again, if were being transparent, all so you can see your asset appreciate).

Taxes, maintenance, etc. are a small price to pay for the earned appreciation. Even smaller when compared to the rent.

You may pay that when the bill comes due, but lets be honest, your tenet actually pays that over time. If you haven't calculated that into your rental then that would be bad business.

Are you really filling a gap, or just investing in an asset like any other instrument with disregard to restricting the market by reducing availability of affordable housing. I'm pretty sure it's the later.

I buy a house for $500,000. I know property taxes + repairs/depreciation + the amount of time I spend interacting with tenets will cost ~3-4% the cost of my property per year. I know with the stock market, I can average returns of around 8%. So, in order to make the real estate property attractive, I need to rent it out for ~12% of the purchase price per year or since we usually discuss rent in a monthly rate, I need to charge tenets about 1% per month. In this example, $5,000 per month.

Where I live, apartments are selling for $500,000 but rent for similar apartments are closer to $2,000-$2500. Not $5,000. So, the owners of the property are getting 6% of the property value in rent per year which minus the 3-4% costs gives them a net profit of 2-3% the cost of the property. Why would anyone do this? Some might have bought the property at a lower value but they could always sell and invest in something more lucrative if they wanted. From an opportunity cost perspective, they aren't much different than someone buying in at the higher rate. So, from an actually logical viewpoint (let's not claim real estate investors are just too stupid to realize what they're doing), I see 2 possibilities:

1. They're speculating that the price will go up. My area has seen housing prices go up an average of 5% per year for the last 30+ years. If you are getting 2-3% ROI from rent and 5% ROI from housing price increase, that's 7-8% ROI which isn't bad. You're claiming real estate isn't speculative so let's take a look at the other option I can imagine to see if it paints a better picture.

2. They're highly leveraged. If you have 20x leverage at an interest rate of 2.5%, and subtract your interest payments from the 3% you made, you get 0.5% of the property value in profit when you only invested 5% giving you a 10% ROI. Again, not too bad a deal for the landlord. Different risk profile than stocks but about the similar returns. Unfortunately, this situation isn't very flattering to landlords IMO. In that case they're basically taking advantage of the fact that they have access to cheap credit and their tenets don't. That cheap credit by the way only existed because of the federal reserve and we'll all be paying it back in some form or another (possibly through high inflation rates possibly some other way).

I'm not saying landlords are evil or anything. This is the game that our government created and landlords are just playing the game. I am however saying that I don't think this game is good or sustainable and maybe our government should change the game. If that requires screwing over the people that have bought housing in the last few years, so be it. I'm not going to feel too bad for either the person that has been speculating on housing or the person that over leveraged themselves. If you aren't either of those people, housing prices collapsing shouldn't scare you that much. If you noticed, my argument is based on rent being too low in comparison to house prices. I can absolutely see a situation where home prices drop a significant amount but rent prices stay about the same. That scenario shouldn't hurt you if you aren't in either of the camps I listed above.

Efficient for whom? The person who has a one-off need for housing every few years? Or the person who already has the time, money, and connections to leverage money into bundling up more housing for themselves to loan out to that first group?

This also presumes that housing, at least primary residences, should be a market instead of a utility, which is not at all a given considering how the "market" is working out (or not) for a lot of people right now. Tools like this further increase that gap.

Right now, money that would go into other investments is going into having to buy inflated housing. So while this might help people who are currently retiring, it hurt the people looking to use it as a method to rite in the future.

Forbes has some good insights here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/02/28/treating...