2年前

It's just business

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I think the difference with the first 5 is that a manufacturer sets the price, scalpers purchase it by that price and sells it at a much higher one.
The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone (or did he purchase it from another scalper?)
Yes, the problem is the high prices of houses, but to reduce it we need to either increase supply (encourage building more, perhaps changing zoning laws to allow more homes etc) or reduce demand (increase interest rates (that though make it harder for regular people), restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
- Land. Value. Tax.
  Value.
  Tax.
  
  It’s wild that you don’t see how exploitable such a tax would be. Specifically, it would make gentrification occur more easily and quickly.
  If a developer became interested in rebuilding a poor neighborhood, their interest alone would dramatically raise the land value of the area. The now untenable tax burden would force the current residents to move out, and because the developer would be the only one interested in buying, the developer has nearly complete control over the sale price.
- For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They'll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can "regenerate" the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn't ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.
  For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an "investor" or "developer" who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There's no risk. There isn't necessarily any work carried out. There's no service provided. It's just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.
  It's the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.
  So the idea that "If it's so easy, why doesn't everybody do it?" or "It's fair, because they paid above asking price, you could just have bid higher" is wrong because I for one can't afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.
  This is how capital accrues.
- I don't enjoy the whole foreign investor solution, I think it's a scape goat.
  It matters little to me if the person fucking me was born in China or 10 miles from me. Being born in this country doesn't mean you can screw over the rest of the population.
  I'd rather see hard limits on how much property one can own. There is no reason for anyone other than the state to own those huge apartment complexes. Dismantle the land barons class, no one should own enough to house thousands.
  
  I think a less heavy-handed way of doing that is, every person can have 1 (one) permanent residence, and all other property you own incurs a much higher property tax. If you're filthy rich and want a couple of houses, fine, but you're gonna get taxed for it. But that will stop speculative house buying, more or less. Of course, this will never happen because states race to the bottom to offer low taxes to attract rich people. Another issue is, what if someone wants to live in a house but can't afford to own it? Renting is the best option for a lot of people. I think that is solvable, but my idea would inevitably take a lot of property off the rental market.
  
  I don't think it is a scape goat. For example, many people from China are not trusting Chinese Yen, they often purchase property purely to hold value and won't even rent it to others, because it would cause wear and tear. So it is basically a wasted unoccupied unit.
  As for your suggestions I totally agree.
- The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone.
  That doesn't mean everyone (or people who needed it) have the ability to purchase it. The down-payment is simply too high that most people who want a house cannot afford it.
  This is the same as scalping other goods, they have a unfair advantage in the market, and then they can make back all their money via rent and selling the house. They have nearly no way to lose in this game.
  The unfair advantage is what making people angry; they are not making money by labor, insight, or even luck. The only reason these people are becoming richer is because they started rich.
  I absolutely agree with your solution BTW, just arguing that people scalping houses are very much brain-dead scalpers. Many of them probably don't even care about the basic human right to shelter.
- restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.
  Agreed, we should be doing all of those things. Corporations should not be able to own any kind of housing at all, and multi unit buildings should be under non-profit co-ops.
  And to penalize unoccupied housing, we should have a georgist taxation system.
  
  The only time it makes sense for me for a corporation to own a residence is if they have a need to put up their own employees in that area regularly, or if I needed a manager living on site (like some storage facilities have). Corporations should not make their money renting or buying/selling single family homes.
  
  I'm not sure I'd agree that corporate ownership is necessarily bad If you want to rent an apartment because you don't want to buy into a co-op then how do you go about this? Someone needs to own the apartment to rent to you Personally I don't mind if that initial investment comes from a person or a corporation
- The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone
  The goods from manufacturers are available at that price for everyone too, right?
  And then as another commenter said, sometimes down payments on housing are outside the budgets of certain groups in society - a point I suppose you can also make for the manufactured goods too.
  I think the difference with the first 5 is that a manufacturer sets the price, scalpers purchase it by that price and sells it at a much higher one.
  I don't see the difference here with housing. If a real estate owner buys a property then sells that property for higher than they purchased it, the market will either respond by buying or not. The same is true for manufactured goods: if the price set at MSRP doesn't not elicit a response from the market, then the manufacturer may lower their prices until a response is drawn - or hold out until the rest of the economy shifts (a gamble on the part of the manufacturer).
  I don't think your reasons substantiate your claims.

Buying up enough of something so that you're one of the only names in town is a "smart business move", because then you can start to charge whatever prices you want. Totally not scalping. You see it in private healthcare, food, newsmedia, streaming, telecom.
- Capitalism is both disgusting and predictable.
- Not just buying it up, of course, but making the market openly hostile to any kind of competition.
  Maybe that's through state regulation. Maybe that's through some smear campaign. Maybe that's through leveraged buyouts or vertical integration or just doing a little industrial espionage to fuck over the business next door.
  Just ask Aaron Swartz what happens to guys who try to foster open-sourced alternatives to cartels and monopoly concerns.

I'm actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here's why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class "free market" bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it's an appreciable asset. I've seen these people my entire life. They'll decry socialism and make the age old joke that "socialism is when no potato." But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking "Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit" memes. They'll say things like "scalping should be illegal" or "the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever." Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn't directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they'd ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.
- It's free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you're imbecile.
  Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.
  You would say: it's a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What's the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you're going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.
  So how does the economy even work if that's possible? That's right idiot - because it's price fixing and it's fucking illegal.
  
  The incentive here would be that a new company could sell far more fridges when reasonably prices compared to their competitors and take all of their market share
  But yes of course govt regulation is required when there is actual price fixing going on. I'd also like to know the alternative way of pricing goods/services from people with the alternate view
- This take is basically accelerationism. That if something is bad it will inspire more people to change their opinion. Your take is fine, I guess.
  
  I agree with the sentiment but feel like it doesn't really work that way. It's what I learnt from 2020 at least, whenever things turn to worse, people would rather do nothing than change anything. That makes a bit afraid of how bad should something get for changes to occur
- man that's a lot of words to say that a theoretical person is a hypocrite
- I'd rather have retailers and manufacturers agree on a way to start prices high, then bring the price down towards the target MSRP every time the item is back in stock. That prevents scalping, let's consumers decide exactly how much "get it early" tax they're willing to pay, and gives the money to the people that did 99% of the work.
  The simple reality is that if there are more people interested in a good at the current price than there are goods available, you must select a way to figure out who gets those scarce items. Raising prices and lotteries where you verify everyone participating is a distinct human are probably the most fair options.
- Economic liberals being dumb. Truly shocking. Now tell me a story about how conservatives are dumb.
  
  He just did.

I feel like North America could fix its housing issue by simply abolishing the single family housing zones
- No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.
  What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.
  
  What are your thoughts on a platform city like the one in Final Fantasy 7?
- they could fix the housing crisis by regulating the market.
  
  They could also fix it by deregulating the market.
  They could also fix it by doing basically random changes to the law, because the law currently is perpetuating the crisis.
  Fuck it. Put a pen on the jaw of a goat eating grass, and write the result into law. I think we actually have a shot at improvement this way.
- Zoning laws in the US are particularly fucked. This video breaks it down quite nicely, I find.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  This video
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Idk, its not like there's no housing shourtage/rant gauging in other countries with more sensible zoning.
  
  It's a zoning problem all along. See: Canada, Netherlands, Ireland...
  
  Zoning is irrelevant. Perfect zoning laws could mean 10x the houses - and the investors will buy them all up and supercharge property prices all over again.
- Here is the thing North Americans love single family homes.
  
  How would you know, North America is literally missing the opportunity to have new development of things other than single family houses or apartment big buildings, bet you there would be a lot of demand for midrises, row houses, mixed neighborhoods in general
  
  Developers in my city are building apartments like mad and filling every single one of them. The common council finally opened up zoning for row housing in the past year.
- I'd rather die in a fire.
  
  Do it then
  
  I don't see anyone stopping you
  
  Same. I've lived in all the basic types of housing: apartment, duplex, house, etc... If I liked being woken up at 3am by some drunk asshole stomping around in the apartment above me or some kid storming in because they don't understand addresses yet, then I would be doing that already. Maybe other people enjoy that sort of thing? You can have your congested living conditions, but leave me and my single-family zone out of it

I don’t know why this is controversial. It’s just a fact at this point.
- It’s not scalping if you bought them on the secondary market, it’s hoarding.

We'll you see if you're making people pay extra for their human rights that's called investing. Not puny recreational items.
This is a joke. But it is a pattern I noticed in this sample.

yeah someone needs to stop the Chinese from buying up residential property everywhere
- If only there were some sort of governing body that could regulate things like that...
- Over here foreign investors are banned from buying property, they can only build property. Unless you send your kid to uni here, then it's all fine apparently
  
  And if we in the US tried banning foreign investors buying houses we’d be called racists. It needs to be done. I’m tired of not being able to afford anything where I live
- No one should be able to, regardless of where they come from. China is a scapegoat.
  
  Op has right idea but terrible phrasing. Sounds racist (well, xenophobic) and I actually started trying to type a (tongue-in-cheek) racist response, but I couldn’t get the tongue-and-cheekiness strong enough to be clear I was mocking it.
  
  Not a scapegoat but the current largest offender.
- Yes, we should ban foreign investors. Especially the US companies that want to profit from our housing scarcity.
- Technically, China did... They've limited yearly investment outside the country to ~$20k, which would significantly dampen it. They're even cracking down on the multi millionaires
  Granted, laws don't seem to work on billionaires or multinational corporations. China having those is a problem...
  The US ones are really doing a number too... Investment funds like Black Rock gaming the market have been the biggest issue, they've been snatching up everything at a bit above market rate or below in an area, which makes the price skyrocket. Some of them are renting them out and driving up rent prices, but a lot of them are just collecting them like Pokemon cards and leaving them empty until they (presumably) decide it's time to sell.
  Granted, that's probably more like billionaires all over the world collectively doing it indirectly

They're all investments. Most of these products are specifically setup by artificial over demand and under production to be profitable, basically exploiting the fact that there are 8 BILLION humans and a small group have most of the money.
Shit like this wouldn't work in a stable global economic system that wasn't headed for collapse on a bullet train

its called rent seeking for a reason

Just an inherent consequence of capitalism. If people are willing to pay much more than the price that was set by the manufacturer, it's their loss and a business opportunity for third parties.
- Yep, so we should abolish Capitalism.
  
  So you will own nothing and be happy?
  Who will produce things without incentive as monetary gain through which they can acquire things? Noone

Is Cirno in high demand?
- No fucking ice fairies allowed, removed!
  
  Whew, that's a sentence you've got to be careful with
- No but the cursed astolfo bean plush is

Cirno doll > house

Based

A scalper too. 🤌

So either all are wrong or all are right. Which is it? Cuz I know people who complain about house flippers, but are totally willing to scalp products like these.
- Scalping is wrong, and scalping houses is worse.
  
  No, all is just as bad. Scalpers are preventing people from getting things that they want unless they pay a premium. They're not contributing anything to society at all.

No one is buying new homes and then turning around and selling them. They would lose their ass. They don't have a fixed price. Builders are selling each and every one for every dollar they can. Investors are typically buying distressed properties that the seller can't sell and the buyer can't buy in it's current state, repairing it and only then reselling it. If they didn't those sellers would just be stuck in those broken down homes forever.
- There are some that do this, but having recently gone through home buying, a lot of them cover up problems with cheap finishes or don't fix things correctly, then charge a premium
- Also realtors take 6%

My opinions nobody asked for:
I really don't care if people want to scalp non-essential goods tbh. It sucks but my life intersects with those items so seldom that it doesn't impact me. I make a slight exception for things like electronics (i.e. GPUs a few years ago) because some peoples' livelihoods are directly tied to being able to access those goods.
If you try to flip houses for profit, you're neither a scalper nor an investor. You're a sociopath at best and a murderer at worst
- I have to disagree with the first part, the principal applies unilaterally. Second part, you're bang on.
  
  Appreciate the disagreement. Honestly, I just don't care. I've basically sculpted my entire life to avoid high-demand, low-supply luxury goods. It just doesn't impact me whatsoever whether or not two consenting adults want to buy/sell an action figure for 10x over MSRP.
- Perhaps we have a different definition of "flip" but the one familiar with is taking a home in bad shape then fixing it (usually yourself, because hiring a contractor would cost more than the profit). I don't flip myself, but I don't see this as a negative. Someone put effort to improve the house and gets profit from it (yes, there's an issue that they might use the cheapest materials, because they won't live there and just want to make it look good, but that's a different issue).
  The biggest issue in driving prices up is low supply and high demand.
  We should change zoning laws to allow building more houses and also place restrictions on houses purchased by corporations and international investors. Oh yeah, Airbnb is another one that drives prices up.
  
  The issue with flipping is that they draw from the same pool of housing as the rest of the people. If a party is interested in purchasing a house to live in and along comes a flipper and purchases it instead, the flipper will add on a profit for his service, that nobody asked for.
  Presumably, the party that wanted to live in had already seen the state of the house and was prepared to pay for fixes. Let's say both them and the flipper would use the cheapest materials and labour possible, levelling out the equation. The profit for the flipper has to come from somewhere then - something extra added beyond the labour and material cost - something somebody who would live there would not have to pay in normal circumstances. They do DIY to save on labour? Great - they can be contractors then, not flippers.
  This means to me that flipper not only does not add any value to the house, but inflicts extra costs upon any good faith buyers. Add to that the fact that tastes vary greatly between people and they might actually do some damage by decorating or remodelling in a style thay may not appeal to everyone, or in a bland style. All of it could have been avoided if the flipper just fecked off. House flippers are like the people rushing to pump your gas for you before you get out of the car and then expecting a tip.
  
  That was the old way - this meme is good b/c it is aware of that and discounts those situations, while the person you are replying to did not display that awareness.
- I mean if you manage to make money flipping houses, go for it. But I don't know how in the hell that's possible in this market.
  
  On a small scale, I agree. I don't have much issue with individuals or local groups of people buying run down houses, repairing and modernizing them, and selling them on market for a bit of profit. But a terrible positive feedback loop has formed in the past ~10 years where everyone wants to flip houses^1 and no one wants to take a loss. It's been terrible for lower income people who can't even afford even the cheapest housing on the market. Therefore, it's just easier for me to discount housing flippers indiscriminately.
  Read: painting walls grey, cabinets white, and replacing carpet with shitty grey vinyl faux wood flooring.
- I get it. Scalping sucks, but one is an annoyance, one causes a measurable impact, and the last is fucking murdering people and collapsing the foundation of society.
  It's all wrong, but the magnitude of harm is much bigger
- That's today's Lemmy Moment of the day.
  Besides, don't house flippers generally renovate the house, and generally make it more presentable?
  
  See my other comment about positive-feedback loops. The House Flipping trend of the late 2000s was never sustainable.
  On the matter of more presentable, I disagree strongly. Late-Stage Professional House Flippers are concerned with nothing but profit. The quality, fit, and finish of their renovations are tastelessly bad. In almost every case, I refuse to believe that House flippers do a better job cosmetically than if the home had sold to people who would be living there who would then be able to work with a contractor to fix up the house into exactly what they want.
  Source: I've spent more hundreds of hours than I can count doing sub work for house flippers. There's nothing defensible about what they do.

The home investor pays pretty harsh taxes for flipping a house less than a year. Unless the scalper actually puts their own money into it to improve the home, the taxes alone would make the investment bad.
Basically there is usually some sort of value add an investor does to maximize profits.

Scalpers trying to justify scalping. Nope. Please find something better to do with your time.
- I don't think this is a pro-scalper meme, more like an anti real estate "investor" mene
  
  I'm not so sure. It's just one home that's been posted. Then again, the nuance of predatory property 'investing' isn't easy to represent in one picture.
  In any case, I don't get the feeling that the meme is saying that they're as bad as each other, it's making excuses for scalper exploiting consumers.

Hardly the same comparison. People buy houses when there isn't demand and sell when there is.
- When was the last time there wasn't housing demand?
  Also big companies are now owning a huge part of the overall houses.
  
  You could find out when there wasn't housing demand simply by looking house prices in an area over time. If it flattens or falls in an area, then demand has fallen. And instead of sobbing that people richer than you can afford to buy a particular house at the market rate, you should instead be lobbying state & city governments to change the absurd building codes that prevent more affordable urban housing to be built that the suburban sprawl that afflicts most US cities.
  
  There are cycles of supply and demand in housing. This is as obvious as looking at graphs of house prices. So this meme is utter nonsense as is the conceit that somebody buying a house to sell it later is somehow evil or a "scalper". Boo fucking hoo basically.
- No demand for places to live? Get a grip.
  
  There are plenty of places NOBODY wants to live, where there is no demand for houses and prices are rockbottom. Funny how market economies work.
- Touched a nerve here and gotta say I find it funny.

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