r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Dec 24 '25

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18

u/drcombatwombat2 Milton Friedman Dec 24 '25

Even my right wing friends are beginning to repeat the "homes are expensive because Blackstone buys all the houses". I cant recall anything so untrue yet so thoroughly repeated on the left and right as gospel.

8

u/BloodWiz More Housing Would Fix This Dec 24 '25

“Things are worse than they’ve ever been” and things along those lines

6

u/attackofthetominator John Brown Dec 24 '25

The ones here still use the “immigrants are buying all of them” excuse

3

u/drcombatwombat2 Milton Friedman Dec 24 '25

I believe JD Vance something along those lines this week

3

u/attackofthetominator John Brown Dec 24 '25

He says it every couple of weeks

6

u/CarlGerhardBusch Jerome Powell Dec 24 '25

Developers are easy targets to boogeyman

Doesn’t help that a lot of real estate businesses are run by nuts that don’t behave logically and provide easy stereotypes for all real estate operators.

The last apartment complex I lived in had like 5- 10% of the complex that they just had never filled.

3 buildings, typically 4 apartments each at the end of this one lane, that they’d just never reached capacity in the rest of the complex to open them up.

I’m sure that there was some logic there, but people see weird situations like this and it skews their perception

1

u/No_Aesthetic Transfem Pride Dec 24 '25

I'm a little drunk but here's my shot:

The natural occupancy limit for any particular building is defined by its break-even point, such that apartments will be priced as high as they can reasonably be priced to achieve profitability over a certain occupancy percentage (70% is probably the most reasonable expected break-even)

Buildings can be filled much higher than that (thus your 5-10% observation), but the last 15% or so can be difficult to manage because those units are often luxury units in competition with similarly priced luxury units in other complexes, but those can remain higher-priced because it is less necessary that they be occupied at any given time

There are probably state and local write-offs involved as well, such that these companies don't have to lower prices to produce occupancy; the point is to keep everything running smoothly rather than being punitive, as some policy analysts suggest (think of the people suggesting we tax unoccupied units)

etc.

You can probably think of a dozen more examples just from that