Mojo ♻️

Another day, another "hidden dangers of CGT reform" op-ed — this one authored by a buyers' advocate and founder of a property investment firm. Completely unbiased, obviously.
The central argument: if investors don't buy existing houses, those houses will simply cease to exist. The bricks will dematerialise. The land will dissolve into the void. First home buyers cannot purchase a property unless a landlord purchases it first, apparently.
The piece never quite grapples with the fact that a house sold by an exiting investor is… a house someone else can buy. Possibly even someone who wants to, you know, live in it.

#HousingCrisis #NegativeGearing #AusPol #CGT #propertyInvestment #bullshit

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/hitting-landlords-with-changes-to-capital-gains-tax-has-hidden-dangers-fewer-will-enter-040004131.html

Hitting landlords with changes to capital gains tax has hidden dangers: 'Fewer will enter'

The real danger of blunt CGT reform is not that investors will suffer – it’s that renters will.

Yahoo
Mar 15 at 5:04amWeb
Show threadkauerMar 15
@mojo Not disagreeing, but isn't his point that investment in building houses will slow if houses are less attractive to investors?
Show threadMojo ♻️Mar 15

@kauer So by that reasoning, houses are built for landlords and investors, not people who need somewhere to live. First home buyers are priced out before a single brick is laid, because the entire system is oriented around making property attractive to capital rather than habitable for humans. That's exactly the problem.

#housing #housingcrisis #firsthomebuyers

Show threadkauerMar 15

@mojo Again, I am not agreeing with him, but yes. Nouh's error is to assume that investment is the *only* possible reason for building houses (or perhaps just the *best* reason for building houses). Which is pretty obviously a stupid argument.

Put another way, if a system's purpose is what it does, one could argue that the purpose of the current system is to encourage investors to build houses. The mistake is to think that there can't be any other good reasons to build houses. A meta-mistake is not to see the harms that the system is doing, because as you say the real purpose of houses is to house people, it's not to make money for investors. By that measure, the current system is failing.

Show threadkauerMar 15
@mojo So my original point was that he is not saying houses will evaporate, so attacking him on that point isn't effective.