Dropping the rate will do nothing for affordability. Prices will go up within 2weeks.
To truly fix the mess they must make houses unable to be used as investment-only vehicles.
No more hoarding of houses for the purpose of extortion rental rates.
You’re only half right.
To truly fix the mess, they must make houses unable to be used AT ALL for investment. No homeowner should turn a profit off simply living in a home. The only way to do that is for housing prices to exceed wage inflation, and if housing prices exceed wage inflation they will by simply math always be getting more expensive relative to income.
I don’t have a problem with landlords renting homes, and even profiting off providing the service. They just shouldn’t be able to profit from the rental AND profit from the house appreciating in value faster than inflation.
I don’t have a problem with developers tearing down homes and building newer units. They should just only profit from the construction work they put in, and not from holding the land for years until it’s gone up in value, or buying things up cheaply and having the value of the land increase because they got it rezoned.
House prices need to be like car prices if we want this fixed. You buy a home and it’s value depreciates over time. The land value shouldn’t change, or if it does, the profit from that should go directly to the government to completely remove the incentive for investment. The only reason people should own a home is to live in it.
Japanese real estate appreciates.
The answer to that is incredibly complicated. Generally speaking though, if you buy a home in Japan, you sell it for less than you originally paid. Unless you bought your property prior to the mid 80s.
Also, Land (and the old houses on them) are effectively free outside of the major cities at this point. Even small cities are so cheap as to be laughably priced, entire (mostly outdated) homes for under $100,000.
Markets loom. I guess AI hasn’t mastered subject/verb agreement yet.
It’s not real journalism unless you can use the word “slam” in your headline.