Mastodawn

MicroWave May 10, 2024

Wall Street has spent billions buying homes. A crackdown is looming.

Wall Street has spent billions buying homes. A crackdown is looming. - Lemmy.World

Lawmakers say investors that scooped up hundreds of thousands of houses to rent out are driving up home prices Wall Street went on a home-buying spree. Now, more lawmakers want to stop it from ever happening again. Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House have sponsored legislation that would force large owners of single-family homes to sell houses to family buyers. A Republican’s bill in the Ohio state legislature aims to drive out institutional owners through heavy taxation. Lawmakers in Nebraska, California, New York, Minnesota and North Carolina are among those proposing similar laws. While homeowner associations for years have sought to stop investors from buying and renting out houses in their neighborhoods, the legislative proposals represent a new effort by elected officials to regulate Wall Street’s appetite for single-family homes. These lawmakers say that investors that have scooped up hundreds of thousands of houses to rent out are contributing to the dearth of homes for sale and driving up home prices. They argue that investor buying has made it harder for first-time buyers to compete with Wall Street-backed investment firms and their all-cash offers. Non-paywall link [https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/wall-street-has-spent-billions-buying-homes-a-crackdown-is-looming/ar-AA1nQQvi]

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Boozilla May 10, 2024

Our HOA made it much harder for corporate raider types to buy and rent houses in our neighborhood. Took a lot of legwork and paying a lawyer to get the changes passed. Was well worth it, though. Sleep better at night.

I’ve mentioned this before on Lemmy, and a few pious Ackshualemmys felt the compulsion to preach about how this was just a move to keep home prices up. But it really wasn’t. The legal language still allows individual families to rent their homes if they want to. But it strictly limits how many corporate / institutional type landlords can be in the neighborhood.

My main point here is: as much as most of us hate HOAs (including me)…if you have an HOA think about leveraging it to help slow this corporate creep of mass home buying.

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Chris May 10, 2024

My problem with HOA’s is that they seem to have no accountability if a power tripping asshole is in charge. If HOA’s lost the ability to put leans on properties and was just an organization that neighbors joined of their own volition, it might be better

Then again, if they don’t have that power then they can’t do what your HOA did.

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Milk_Sheikh

My guy YOU are the accountability. Yes, it’s another exhausting and thankless form of governance, but if you hate the board and the despots? Run a flyer campaign, run for the board/leadership, get on the finance committee and run obstruction, abuse the bylaws and force actual proper process and procedure - the power trippers rarely are actual good administrators, and generally hate procedures and checks on power.

It’s not a fun process to fight back, but “refi and run” doesn’t solve the issue of bad HOAs/leadership