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You're very wrong. Hedge funds buy houses to rent them out at market rates, which go up as home prices go up. They aren't running a charity.
The current situation is good only for those who can afford multiple investment properties, and it's at everyone else's expense.
Seriously... And there isn't exactly an issue with finding places to rent, the issue is with what those greedy fucking corporations ask for rent. $3000/mo for a tiny p.o.s "luxury" apartment, or a shack mislabeld as a house is an absolute joke. If I had that kind of money I wouldn't need to rent ffs...
If the corporations are asking market rates for rent then it doesn't matter if they are greedy or not, they will set rent at the same level an individual would.
If they are setting rent above the market rent then you can just go somewhere else for cheaper so it isn't a problem for you.
If they don't buy the property the supply is higher... meaning prices come down and individuals can purchase at lower costs. They artificially jack up the demand on an equal supply.
That's only looking at house demand. It's true as long as you only look at prices for purchasing houses, which is an activity done by relatively rich people. You are indeed helping people with enough wealth to purchase a house.
My point is that the corporations are not just sitting on these houses, they are turning them into rentals. So they are increasing the supply of rentals, lowering the price to rent. And renters are typically poorer than the people with enough wealth to purchase a house.
So the ban would help the relatively richer people and hurt the poorer.
And the steps of buying "under prices" homes alorithmically inevitably (and intentionally) means they are manipulating the housing market to NOT correct.
I.E., if prices start to fall, corps swoop in to pick up supply because their estimates say these properties will be worth more. Their act of doing it insures that it happens, and individuals are forced to compete if they want housing security.
The same goes for the rental market. Even without the blatant collusion tools already exposed, Corp market evaluations to min/max their rental prices ensures that others follow suit.
It's market manipulation all around by those that have enough capital to force everyone else to play by their rules.
Everything is at market rates, what is changing is supply and demand. Fewer houses available to rent = higher rents. That is the market. If there are more houses available to rent, rent will be lower than it otherwise would be.
The market is not "places to rent", it's "places to live." If the cost of buying a home falls, the cost of renting a home will fall as well to compete. If what you are saying is true, the cost of renting should have gone down as more private equity gets into the residential market. The opposite has happened.
You understand that when someone buys a home to live in, demand shrinks along with the supply, right?
If you look at the market as "places to live" then banning corporate home purchasing does nothing to supply or demand and thus does not change the price at all. There are still the same number of people who need housing.
Everything we're talking about is relative to what prices would be otherwise. Rent has increased because there was massive inflation, that doesn't prove or disprove the impact of corporate homeownership.
Taking (corporate) buyers out of the market is what reducing demand means. Not to mention the corporate buyers are the ones buying up real estate so they can profit off the difference between the rent they charge and the loans they pay off. They're very much unnecessary middlemen. I'm not saying smaller landlords don't do that too, but corporate involvement is one of the reasons investor buying power so heavily outweighs resident buying power.
Real estate values have been massively outpacing inflation for decades. Inflation is normal, and has always been a force in economics. Such a huge portion of the middle and working class being unable to own a house is not normal, and since we haven't had a population explosion or a collapse of the construction industry, a bubble is the best explanation.
The corporate buyers are just buying the houses to rent out. They are switching the home from owned to rented. The corporation isn't a living person who lives in the house they bought. They only impact demand in the amount they switch, which only matters if you're splitting up owned vs rented, because that's what they change. If you're combining all housing demand to be all people who need housing, the corporations have zero demand for housing, they don't impact overall demand at all.
There's always a profit motive at any level, prices are going to be a result of market forces, we don't give them extra because they're a corporation. If a corporation is acting monopolistically, that should obviously be banned, and it is.
There's a larger structural question on whether ALL landlording is "unnecessary middlemen" but that as a solution would be such a huge change and involve seizing property and such that I think that's outside the realm of the possible. If we're allowing some landlords, profit is just going to be part of rental payments as it already is.