If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
If only the people that would make these laws were not the ones profiting from it.
There is one huge flaw with the idea, whose aims I fully support: banks regularly own hundreds and thousands of homes through foreclosures. They need to be able to take back a home, because that is what makes it possible to have cheap mortgages. Banks are in fact some of the largest home owners in the country.
What might work better is a sales tax. Everybody pays some godawfully huge amount of money, like 10%, when they purchase a home. You add a 0% sales tax for a primary residence (which of course needs a resident, which is a physical person), maybe a 5% tax for a secondary.
The main goal is twofold: make homes artificially expensive when purchase is not tied to occupancy and discourage short-term speculation. This saves the ability of banks to repossess a home (there is no sale here), and it allows for expansion of rental housing, since the tax is one-time and not recurring, meaning its impact is minimized with prolonged ownership.
I firmly believe every home after your second (let retired people have their cabins) should be taxed exponentially.
The third home should be taxed so heavily that it’s prohibitive, and the fourth should be taxed so highly that it’s impossible to profit off of.
exponentially
no. at 100% mil rate. ie: its value. every year.
if you can’t afford it, then sell it to someone who needs a home. :)
Should be the same concept with rental units. Taxes should go up exponentially for every unit you own over a certain limit. Of course if there’s is a limit to how many homes or units a person can own, they will just create thousands of small corporations to own them.
Have to ban corporate ownership of residential property as well or some other fix.
I’d go further and cap the number of home one should be able to own, to like 2.
- there is zero need to own two homes.
When people think of two homes the second is usually a cottage or other seasonal property that you can’t really live in while participating in society. So it’s not really taking something away. Sure an argument could be made, but here in Canada if you put homeless people in cottages you’d just have a bunch of people frozen to death by spring.
no. “cant really live in” means “needs work to go from 3 seasons to 4.” and then be sold to someone who needs a home.
otherwise it’s a campsite not a “2nd home.”
I assume they didn’t mean seasonal as in “can only be used in certain seasons”, rather that you occupy it for vacation or summer or whatever. Not sure if you are from a non-mountany or very populated country, but where I come from, mountain “hüttes” are a thing and do not contribute to the housing crisis - or at least not in the usual way I can think of. Some people choose to live in those areas, I am very envious of their courage and peace :) But 99% do not make this choice, just use it for winter/summer long get-aways.
What if, instead of that, property tax was based on the assessed value of the property when assessed for its current use? But also by “current” we mean like 5-10 years ago and when we assess we don’t look at recent neighborhood comps, we look at the previously assessed value.
IMO it should be very low for 1 acre, but the amount of tax you pay per acre increases with every acre you own. Farmers would get an exemption for agricultural land, but only if they bring a crop to the market so it’s designated as used farmland. This would prevent rich people with 1,000 acres from calling their private property a farm and paying next to nothing. Nope. Either grow a crop on it or pay uncle sam.
This doesn’t make sense when you consider a lot of land isn’t farmable. And if it’s fixed per acre, then you aren’t really taxing the value of the homes on the land either. The simpler solution is kind of what OP is saying, for each additional home you own there is a multiplier on its property taxes. Say your rate is 1% on your first home, it’s now 2% for the second, 3% for the 3rd, ect. Have 100 homes/apartments, you will be paying 100% of it’s assessed value in taxes each year. It would be interesting to see how that plays out and someone a lot smarter than me could run the simulations of how to disincentivize corporate land ownership without destroying people’s abilities to own homes.
It should be illegal to have dozen of houses to begin with and if you don’t like this you can go fuck yourself because we live in a society
My mayor lives off the rent of 8 houses. I don’t think he’ll do anything to fix it
Fucking disgusting parasite
Some places do this. I have heard a few Welsh areas have gone for much higher council tax (approximate equivalent to a shitty property tax) on second homes. They are allowed to charge up to 4x the normal rate.
If you are renting it out as a holiday rental you can be exempt from the normal council tax but they are now requiring you to actually rent it out. It must be available for at least 252 days of the year and actually used for at least 182 days so you can’t just set rent to unaffordable amounts.
Hearing the crying about it has been great.
Nice.
This gives me an idea.Additional tax for rooms marked as “for rent”, but going unrented for enough part of the year.
Calculation will also take into account recent evictions.I’ve had a similar idea for a while. There should be a fine/tax for unrented properties proportional to the amount being asked for rent. Any money collected from this goes to housing support for low-income renters.
This creates a market incentive to lower rents if you can’t get someone in a unit.
Vacancy tax
I agree in principal, but it’s impossible to implement it in this manner.
What you can do is establish an “owner-occupant” exemption to future tax hikes, then hike taxes through the fucking roof for everyone else.
Landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants to buyers. They’ll be issuing “land contracts” (which strongly favor the tenant/buyer) rather than rental agreements.
You can create a statute to target 85% owner occupancy. Any year the owner occupancy rate is lower than 80%, the property tax rate will be automatically hiked 2% (for non-owner occupied properties only). If the owner-occupancy rate exceeds 90%, the property tax rate is lowered by 1%.
Oh, I like that a lot.
The idea of charging owner-occupants a different tax rate than an investor is fairly common. At least 28 states already have some sort of general “homestead exemption”, “second home tax”, or similar policy.
The changes that need to happen are 1. the exemption needs to be increased at the same rate that the tax is increased; 2. The exemption and tax rate increases need to be tied to a specifically targeted owner-occupancy rate; 3. Federal and state governments cannot be allowed to overrule local authorities on issues of property tax policies.
It’s not a complete cure, but it will convert investors from parasitic landlords to parasitic investors. They’re going to keep ripping us off as best they can. But no matter how badly they will be exploiting us, we will be gaining equity in the process. Going from “zero equity” to “any equity whatsoever” is an infinite improvement over the current degree of exploitation in the housing market.
First one should be free. Let the property investors pay the property taxes. Apparently they can afford them.
A more sensible metric would be the surface area of real estate IMO. A person with a 50 square meters home should not pay the same tax rate as a person with a 5000 square meters mansion.
Everyone get 100 square meters tax free (just an example here, depends on country), 1 x tax rate for the next 100 square meters, 10% increase every additional 100 square meters.
Not sure how that’s more sensible. A percentage of the value of the property is more reflective of what a person should pay. If I own an acre of undeveloped forest, that’s worth much less than a condo in upper Manhattan, but under your proposal I’d be paying significantly more.
Yeah, I thought about that bit but deleted that because it only tangentially related to the topic.
Here’s it again: a multiplier for land use. Farmland get like 0.1, residental 1.0. Also different multipliers for cities, suburbs and rural (to encourage development).
But there are companies that own farmland too, and they will try their best to find loopholes to exploit like they did to residential land. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of writing effective property law today so I stopped there 😆
Perhaps that undeveloped forest would do best without ownership
Your plan would never work in the U.S. No one would know what a square meter is.
Oh sorry I forgot, anything but metric.
So tax free at 1 Oval office, 100% at 2 Oval offices, 110% at 3 Oval offices, and so on…
How many bananas is that?
Roughly 13,300 bananas, assuming very average bananas not too long and not too short, and a lot of patience laying them down on the floor.
I agree with the sentiment but should scale more exponentially.
I feel like two houses is ok’ish but when you start buying three or more is when you cross into commercial purposes.
I should be cost prohibitive to own 4 single family houses.
I’ve often thought that the taxes should relate to whether or not the home is occupied.
If you live in it as your primary dwelling, with more than 50% of your time there, then you should pay the normal amount.
If you have someone leasing the house to live in it, then you should pay the same property taxes as if you were living in it yourself. Maybe a bit higher.
If you’re using it as a full time Airbnb, the taxes should be much, much higher.
Unoccupied rental properties or vacation homes should be taxed at the much higher rate to encourage you to either lower the rent or sell it to someone who can live in it.
If you have someone leasing the house to live in it, then you should pay the same property taxes as if you were living in it yourself. Maybe a bit higher.
Wait why higher if you’re renting or leasing it out? Shouldn’t that be a reduction on taxes due to the home owner not using it for selfish reasons and/or being part of the problem of living in a single family house because owning a single family house is a greedy ass thing to do and makes you an awful person for taking up space that could be used for multi-dwelling apartment complexes.
A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.
Maybe companies shouldn’t be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.
Companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?
Landlords should not exist. Hope that clears it up for you.
Because companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Landlords shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Imagine going to another city to attend university. Can’t just rent for a few years, gotta have initial capital to BUY an apartment first.
I hear this argument all the time. I reject it. There are alternatives.
A “Land Contract” functions very similar to a rental, but it is a purchase agreement. You are a buyer, not a tenant. If you walk away in the first 3-5 years, it functions exactly as a rental agreement, with the only exception being that the monthly payment was fixed for the duration instead of hiked annually.
If you stay longer than this initial 3-5 year period, the agreement automatically converts to a 30 year mortgage with the same payment.
So, you take out a “land contract” on your college apartment instead of a rental agreement. You can return it to the landlord after you graduate, or stay put and gain some equity for a few years.
Why would landlords offer such an arrangement? Simple: we’re providing owner-occupancy exemptions to property tax hikes. If you live in the house you are paying taxes on, you are entitled to the exemption, and pay a low rate. But If you don’t live there, we’re going to send your property tax rate through the fucking roof. You’re going to be begging your tenants to take a land contract instead of a rental agreement.
When we do this, small-time landlords who live in one of the units of a duplex, triplex, or quadplex will be able to rent out the other units while retaining the owner-occupancy credit. Corporate landlords won’t have the same capability. You’ll be able to rent one of these units, if you really want to rent.
Publicly owned apartments you can rent. No need for a landlord who just takes money. That money could go to funding public services instead.
Imagine houses that don’t cost nine and a half fortunes, because they are not considered one of the most profitable ways to invest, for the richest people in the world.
Housing doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive, whether temporary or permanent residences.
It’s not about temporary living in a place not existing, it’s about forbidding the ways that rich people go about making housing scarce, and corner markets.
That is true, but not what was pointed out. Who rents out homes then, it not companies or landlords? I fully agree companies should not own homes. And also believe rent should be pinned to purchase price value +x% per year something. And landlords should not be able to own more than a certain number of dwelling units.
But then who rents out the temporary homes, or homes for people who just don’t want to own for a reason
That works well as a thought terminating slogan online. Less so as a practice in the real life.
I’d hope it was a thought commencing slogan, maybe giving people curiosity as to think:
“How could another sapient person believe something so different from my own beliefs? That person is even making it a joke, therefore they must have had it bouncing around in their brain a bunch, so they must believe it and think about it a lot. Huh, maybe there is something more to know, and think about.”
I even made a comment with a small answer, to the other person, who asked like a human.
Clearly didn’t work on you though.
When people drop these one-liners that perfectly align with the popular view of the platform, my first assumption is that they in fact have not thought about it and instead are just saying the popular thing for applause.
Perhaps that’s a cynical view but in my experience it seems true more often than not. You too walked back on your original statement after being questioned on it. I can’t learn from people who don’t say what they mean or mean what they say.
Why not?
That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:
Being a “landlord”, that is, very specifically, an “owner of houses you don’t live in, but rent to people for profit”, is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.
You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it’s not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:
“Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I’m calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out”
It’s a way of making money, where the owner doesn’t do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.
How is it not helpful to society to allow others to live in your house? And it’s not landlords who are looking for tenants, it’s the other way round.
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Landlords should be prevented from breathing.
Good luck
Oh these 2000 people own 2000 completely unrelated companies! They all make business with each other because the market is so healthy! All the houses are offered at the same prices because the market works so perfectly by forcing companies to compete with each other so the real value is reached!
Is it troubling that this was my first thought?
No, it shows you know how the world works
Okay, now pay business registration taxes on every single one of those subsidiaries.
AND business upkeep taxes on each of tjem too. These increase exponentially too. By the time you own or your comopany owns three homes? Youre being taxed well over 15 million per a year in taxes alone.
And youre not allowed to give control of these living areas or branching companies to one of your relatives, friends, or coworkers UNLESS they themselves do not have a registered living quarters of some type on file.
Companies should pay 10x more.
I think this is the right idea but there should be focus on certain things. Like say car washes. At this point we know it’s a stake to flip the land as prices go up. I live in a place where it’s not uncommon to see a car wash within walking distance from another. May as well be the car wash capital of the world.
Car washes are not houses.
Well of course. But they could have been houses or actual business. I mean there was a burger place, one of the only two left in the country, got torn down and a car wash replaced it. The area was big enough for two or three houses or another business(s). Instead it’s a car wash that I never see anyone at. And this wasn’t like a really great place per say but it was a third space for bike and car meetups. I was trying to reference that those spaces could easily provide housing instead of something useless.
You’re talking about zoning strategies, it’s a whole other subject.
This is about taxing houses (one type of zoning).I’ve sadly seem the same in these parts… derelict houses demolished and replaced with hotels (after the mayor kindly changed the zoning of course).
I see, I wonder how this would affect residential & commercial zoned properties. As in it’s a house but it can also be commercial property. I get calls al the time from companies trying to buy my house because of it. The nursing home keeps sending offers two houses down, I’m sure they get the spam as well, to expand their facility.
