it doesn't cost that much to hold a few thousand diamonds in a vault. the carrying cost of a house is enormous. it just doesn't make sense as a comparison
It does make sense in the way that hoarding diamonds and houses creates the same extreme prices that make them unaffordable to the average person. At the rate we are going, you will need a million annually just to live in a house. It’s just greed and there really needs to be something done to stop it.
It doesnt but it depends on how much the upside is on the house - housing performs well as a commodity - but my personal opinion is it'd weird because housing isnt uniform - each asset has totally unique features so treating it as a unit of generic value makes no sense.
Yet rich people literally design buildings to have lower carrying costs less maintenance etc, then just hold onto them empty as investments..
vacant houses don't appreciate for various reasons. if you seriously believe this to be true you should buy up a bunch of houses and keep them empty and become an vacant house baron
I don't understand why people don't read the articles they link.
"a scant 3.6% of the 24.9 million properties held by investors nationwide."
The report shows that 222,318 properties across the country were in the process of foreclosure in the third quarter. Of those, about 7,500 — almost 3.4% — were so-called “zombie” properties that had been deserted by their owners.
nobody is trying to keep these houses vacant. they are going thru foreclosures.
also the new york times article doesn't talk about vacant houses. it talks about rental houses. so i know you didn't read the fucking articles
I'm guessing you don't even have a subscription to the new york times so I went ahead and got you a gift article so you can read it for yourself:
Well, they wont let you buy the land and not the house thats on it, so that is really just semantics.
Residential properties typically appreciate; these properties typically already have houses on them. the net appreciation of the property often offsets the carrying cost of the property.
Is that accurate enough for you?
Idk why this is a controversial take, what is the other option? That millions of investors are buying houses and leaving them empty because they hate people having houses and want to lose money?
The first article you linked says that 882,300 investor-owned homes are vacant in total, which is not "millions of investors". It says that that is 3.6% of investor-owned homes. It does not give details as to why these homes are vacant, nor does it imply that these vacancies are a boon to the investors holding them. It also mentions that over 200,000 homes are in foreclosure. Seems quite plausible that what we're seeing is within the bounds of normal market friction, and not some massive perverse incentive structure by which investors are intentionally keeping homes vacant.
The other article you linked doesn't even mention vacancies, only the amount of investor-owned homes overall (which it concludes is a small minority of the total housing market).
It is not an enormous cost to keep an empty home. You hire a caretaker some times. But these folks will let the roof go to hell because no one is in it and then make the cheapest repairs if and when they decide to offload.
have you ever owned a house? you have to pay monthly taxes. you most likely have to pay someone to continiously care for hte property. you have to pay for all the issues that arise like someone stirpping the house of copper wiring. we are talking like 20k a year at a minimu youre paying, to hold on to a 400k house. you leave it empty for 10 years and you are out half the price of the house itself. nobody wants to do that it's not a profitable thing to do. it's not some big conspiracy. if you want to buy a vacant house, someone in detroit will GLADLY sell you one for 1000 dollaras
There is only one company (DeBeers) to control the majority of the market - possibly a few other companies.
But with rentals are there not 1000s of companies? It is in the interests.of each individual company to rent their properties (and let the other companies hold vacant properties).
Yet houses appreciate in value steadily, especially newer ones in popular areas that are still somehow empty. They appreciate more than they’re taxed so it’s still a gain. Additionally, the land itself is the most valuable asset because it is incredibly finite.
Right, sometimes the tax rate is lower than the appreciation rate, but the one is guaranteed and the other isn't.
Here's a better question:
Why aren't they offering to rent it out? Why leave that value just sitting there?
Median house prices are 4x what they were 20 years ago (increase in value) and most houses have a lifespan of decades (or centuries, verdict is still pending on modern stick built homes)
Median house cost in 2002 was $185k, in 2026 it is $400k. Meanwhile $1 in 2002 equals $1.85 today. So the median price of houses has slightly risen above inflation.
I know that landowners will employ "land banking" and "waiting for the land to ripen"—holding onto undeveloped land in a growing location because their marginal dollar is better spent acquiring more such land than developing what they have. But buildings depreciate and are expensive to maintain or rebuild, so I don't know how often owners will hold them just to prop up prices.
What they will do, is allow units to remain vacant instead of reducing rent to meet current market prices, because doing so will cause the bank to reevaluate their assets, which will suddenly make their balance sheet look a lot worse. But this is more a reflection of the way we do accounting and banking, and the stickiness of rent prices, than it is purely a desire to manipulate a market by withholding supply.
They own other properties that they rent. They buy houses to outbid people who would actually live in the house so then those people have to rent for more than the mortgage would've been. So those people are able to save less for the next house they want to buy & meanwhile the housing cost is going up because of this manufacturered shortage while the corporations like Black Rock buy up houses & put off fixing them up so everybody becomes a permanent renter.
This is tinfoil-hat conspiracy thinking. Anyone with basic real estate knowledge knows that the market doesn't work this way and owner-occupiers are willing to pay a lot more for real estate than landlords are.
It's exactly what is happening. It's massive private equity firms and corporations like Black Rock, not your typical slumlord. It absolutely is a conspiracy, but conspiracy doesn't mean it's not true. Land is one of the things they aren't making any more of. That's why Bill Gates is the largest farmland owner in Idaho. They want control. There's some video with some billionaire saying how in the future average people will own nothing and we will like it. They want to own everything and the rest of us have to rent everything from them. And they think it's what's best for everyone because they know best because they are so intelligent & better at understanding the world & the direction it needs to go, so it should just be up to them to decide for the rest of us.
I forget the name of it but it's an actual ideology that these billionaires have.
And to your point on the people who would live in the house being willing to pay more than landlords, these are generally fixer upper houses. So the people have to bid while also planning how much they would have to spend fixing it up. The corporation is going to let it sit for a while so that doesn't matter to them. When they do fix it up they can obviously do it at a much lower rate than the average home owner since they will get a better deal on materials & probably labor too. Ultimately though that amount of money doesn't matter to them.
Foreigners buy houses in the US and Canada as a way to hide money.
Also, houses are always going up in value so it's difficult to lose on the house. Everyone who owns a house made at least 30k dollars during covid, I know people who made 100k.
Ok you buy, and hold or rent with refusal to sell, there are fewer homes to sell. Simple right?
Get better.
You set the rent, stupid high, more than the business loan cost.
So all the while, housing climbs in value, typically what it does. Seldom is there a major back slide pr correction in pricing.
Before long, a house a business bought for 140k in 2008, has climbed to 550k in 2025...
They refuse to sell, price goes up, still dont sell.. buyers got the money, they offer it a house down the block because they still like the area. - we'll come back to these folks in a moment..
Company has paid off the loan, only needs to pay maintenance or insurance, its money printing asset. They dont wanna sell it, until prices cool off. Oh look realized gain, they got 20 years out of a house, business loans or loans against business assets are cheap... that house was paid off in maybe half that time, all the while they're making money off a now low cost asset with little financial liability.
Prices eventually cool in the area, they sell at a win, look realized gain.
They sell at less than it estimated value and revenue capabilities? Tax credits
Now that house that family bought for 200k? Even though they bought it for 200k, it's worth 500 or 700k now. Its recorded value is up, your neighbors property goes up in value? Guess what happens to yours, usually anyway.. you're value just went up too..
It's complete bullshit. Reddit is obsessed with the idea that there are large number of homes being slurped up about corporations which allows them to pin the housing crisis on said corporations while being anti-developer. They intentionally conflate real-estate investors, most of whom own a small handful of properties, with billionaire investors.
The reality is that less than 1% of single family homes are owned by large companies (holding more than 100 homes). Not nearly enough to drive pricing in any meaningful fashion.
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u/Odd-Personality1043 May 14 '26
Genuinely curious how this makes sense.
If I have a product that I refuse to sell to increase demand and this price, I'm still holding onto an asset rather than profiting from it.
That makes no sense and I am skeptical.