It’s always supply. It’s fair to criticize foreign ownership/hedge funds purchasing homes, but the overwhelming reason is that we are not building enough.
Sure, but it's one thing to not be building enough for people to live in, and another thing to not be building enough for people to keep empty flats as speculation vehicles.
How many % of flats are empty? At least in the US the hottest housing markets usually have the lowest vacancy rates. This makes sense, because the opportunity costs for leaving a property empty is higher, so owners are more tempted to rent them out.
The vacancy rates are deceiving though. If you have a place that is owned by someone and they are paying taxes on it, and it's not listed as a rental, it's not considered vacant.
In big cities there are definitely homes that are empty and not listed being used as a store of wealth. In fact just within view of my own home are two houses like that. Both owned by foreign families who wanted a safer place to keep their wealth than their own country (China and India respectively).
>The vacancy rates are deceiving though. If you have a place that is owned by someone and they are paying taxes on it, and it's not listed as a rental, it's not considered vacant.
Occupied Housing Units. A housing unit is occupied if a person or group of persons is living in
it at the time of the interview or if the occupants are only temporarily absent, as for example, on
vacation. The persons living in the unit must consider it their usual place of residence or have no
usual place of residence elsewhere. The count of occupied housing units is the same as the count
of households
Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the
interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one
which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet
occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all
exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are
excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no
longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on
the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters
being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for
the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant
sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not
defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on "Housing
Unit.")
>That happens once every 10 years. They use tax records and other records to estimate it otherwise.
Good thing we did a census in 2020, and the housing crisis (and associated allegations about absentee owners) far predates that.
>Also people will just not return the form, and once again they have to estimate.
Apparently they're pretty persistent. If you don't fill out a form you'll eventually get an enumerator that shows up at your door.
>And in places that impose a vacancy tax, they have incentive to lie or deceive the housing authority to avoid the tax.
The housing authority is independent from the census bureau. Is there any evidence they share data?
>And in my neighbors case for example they come by once every few months to pick up mail and probably fill out those types of forms.
So they're willing to go out of their way and lie to the federal government in order to maybe move the lower the vacancy rate by 0.00001%, when many (most?) people (as evidenced by this thread) are going off vibes and likely won't care anyways? I didn't know that foreign vacant homeowners had such a tight knit cabal.
I think it's really important to press people on this point, because "vacant homes as an investment vehicle" gets trotted out as a thought-killing cliche.
Surely there are some pied-a-terre and vacant investment properties, but vacant rental housing in NYC for example was 1.4% in 2023. I'm not sure how they measure this, but even if you doubled the amount of available rental housing, it would still be an insanely hot rental market.
Places that have stable or decreasing housing prices (NoLa, Austin) have over 10% of rentals vacant.
I still have seen no evidence that VC-backed purchases are having any noticeable impact on the US housing market except possibly in 2 or 3 specific locales (and quite restricted ones at that).
If they want to pay lots of property taxes and contribute to payments for local infrastructure without actually using it, that’s probably a net good thing, IF there were enough additional homes to go around for others.
however, like roads, it is entirely possible that building more in desirable neighborhoods simply leads to more wealthy people having more options for which (otherwise empty) residence they choose to spend the weekend at.