this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162

Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there's still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Income tax on no income sounds fucking stupid. Just up property tax on the 3th or 4th house or apartment by a fuckton, watch everyone panic sell their shit crashing the housing market into oblivion and call it a day. Ez affordable housing.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Denmark applies a property tax to foreign properties at ones disposal. If it's rented, it's waived and tax is levied on the rental income. If it's unoccupied, it's considered a luxury available for your use and thus is taxable property, even though it's in a foreign jurisdiction.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But then the almighty homeowners home value might collapse too!

But for real landlords wohld start destroying their own housing stock to take some tax write off or insurance fraud.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most landlords are like massive corporations, if all the property your corporation owned suddenly exploded it may rise a few eyebrows. Someone's rich aunt renting their second summer home isn't having that much of a detrimental effect on the housing market as corpos buying up all available housing.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My point is they would find some way to legally dispose of their stock to artificially decrease supply and raise prices again. Its particularly the big corporations who would do this.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe but then like stop whatever loophole they are using. Doing nothing is quite a lot worse.

Thankfully the housing market is still fine in my country so I don't have a dog in the race but people in the US should take some pointers from the French and fucking riot at this point. All of yall have like 5 guns per person yet you are like the most demure country when it comes to politicians and corpos just exploiting the fuck out of you.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

people in the US should take some pointers from the French and fucking riot at this point. All of yall have like 5 guns per person yet you are like the most demure country when it comes to politicians and corpos just exploiting the fuck out of you.

Careful, that kind of talk gets you labeled a tankie

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Multiple holder companies incoming. Now that will need to be plugged up.

Not saying this is a bad idea. But they will find loopholes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
  1. Require rental properties to be registered and report when vacant.
  2. Block any new single dwelling rental property purchases.
  3. Only allow more rental property purchases when vacancy rate is below a certain threshold in a metropolitan area.
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't allow companies to own homes. Homes should not be investments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Then renters will be homeless.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, there was just recently a big scandal in my city where one guy bought 20 houses with 9 shell companies. Attempted to do shitty flipping jobs. Selling the houses from one company to the next so they didn't immediately jump up in price in the real estate history.

The sad part is: if he hadn't overpriced the market and sold more of them he would've gotten away with it, but he waited too long and got stuck. But until that point nobody knew one guy had 20 houses, it was 2 per company on paper.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Every single one of all the government measures I've seen to "help people" in the current "tight housing market" is designed to prop-up housing prices and rents, never ever anything which would lower rents or house prices.

In my country they even given money to renters rather than, say, impose rent controls or start large projects building public housing and do this all the while claiming there's not enough money for things like Education.

From my own experience working in Finance every single government measure I've seen on this since a decade ago sure looks a lot like using the power of the State for manipulating the housing market to push prices up.