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 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
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.
The UK has a sales tax like that on home purchases. The problem is that it prevents people from selling houses when their kids move out. It’s too expensive to sell the house and buy a new one, so you have a lot of older couples living in five bedroom houses that are empty.
I don’t think the UK sales tax has an exception for primary residences, is that correct? That is the key ingredient that is missing: regular people should be able to buy and sell their homes to each other without a tax penalty, it’s only when corporations buy and sell that it should apply (well, individuals, too, if they buy more than one or two).
Still better than one corporation owning 500 houses and profiting from them.
Edit the UK has a vacancy rate of zero of about 73% of corporate landlords, so your older couple could rent rooms to 4 lodgers and come out ahead.
They won’t, which is a lifestyle choice.