I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to explain what is ACTUALLY happening to the housing market and the only way to stop it. Homeowners are buying other houses and renting them out as shared homes. They are buying as many properties as they can afford. My landlord in New York, while a great person to rent from, had seventeen houses in one city. In my case, rent was awesome-$500 a month all utilities included! Keep in mind 6 tenants. So $3000 a month for 12 months equals $42,000. For a property listed at $150k at the time. You could buy and resell within 4 years, assuming no repairs. Of course, repairs do happen, so usually tack on a few years, but the key point is the profit is far exceeding the loss. She was essentially getting paid $3000 a month when she was paying between $800-$1200 on a mortgage payment. And this is lower end…but this is happening all across the country. This is why so many landlords refuse repairs…it delays their money to flip a house. They can easily become millionaires within 20 years. The problem? Once that landlord gets that 100% profit and flips it, the house value is doubled, often times with zero modifications. So now my $500 rent would be $1000 for a shared room. Pandemic had nothing to do with this, it was just an easy excuse.
So what can we do? We need a state of emergency, and we need laws that place limits on how many homes a person can own, probably limited to 2. The reality is the reason for the housing shortage is because they are mostly owned by the same wealthy people.