Zillow Home-Flipping Algorithm Outbid Buyers, Now Faces Selling Houses At a Loss 180
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Faced with the fastest-rising real estate prices in U.S. history, Zillow tweaked the algorithms that power its home-flipping operation to make higher offers. It ended up with so many winning bids that it had to stop making new offers on properties. Now, after buying more homes in the third quarter than it ever has before, the company is working through a backlog of houses that need to be fixed up and sold while facing an unpleasant reality: Slowing price appreciation means it will sell many homes at a loss.
Zillow put a record number of homes on the market in September, listing properties at the lowest markups since November 2018, according to research from YipitData. It also cut prices on nearly half of its U.S. listings in the third quarter, according to Yipit, signaling that its inventory was commanding prices lower than it expected. The shift has been on display in places such as Atlanta and Phoenix, two markets where home prices have been surging. Zillow's roughly 250 active listings in Phoenix are currently priced at 6% less, on average, than what the company paid for the homes. That amounts to a $29,000 discount on the typical property, according to data compiled by Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Every key metric I've seen from Zillow over the past few months just doesn't make sense," DelPrete said. "It's like it's making decisions two to three months too late relative to the market."
Zillow put a record number of homes on the market in September, listing properties at the lowest markups since November 2018, according to research from YipitData. It also cut prices on nearly half of its U.S. listings in the third quarter, according to Yipit, signaling that its inventory was commanding prices lower than it expected. The shift has been on display in places such as Atlanta and Phoenix, two markets where home prices have been surging. Zillow's roughly 250 active listings in Phoenix are currently priced at 6% less, on average, than what the company paid for the homes. That amounts to a $29,000 discount on the typical property, according to data compiled by Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Every key metric I've seen from Zillow over the past few months just doesn't make sense," DelPrete said. "It's like it's making decisions two to three months too late relative to the market."
Hollywood's already done this movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Margin-Call [wikipedia.org]
Material cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Material cost is also sky-high, so the cost of flipping is much higher right now. They may be better off sitting on them until it is more affordable to do the remodeling / flipping.
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Empty homes are a problem. They drag neighbourhoods down, are targets for crime and if they are empty because someone is waiting for the price to go up they deprive others of housing.
Japan has a high tax on unoccupied homes to prevent this kind of thing. That's a good idea IMHO.
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Interesting)
There is already a huge "tax" on unused housing - try getting taking an insurance policy on one. Never mind all the maintenance and upkeep on them paying someone to go out do inspections, winterize etc.
Until very recently not may individuals or business intentionally acquired residential real estate to leave vacant while they speculate on appreciations. Generally speaking the costs of ownership ate/eat any profits. There is lot of cost in the transaction too traditionally. Zillow saw a special opportunity there for themselves.
If there is really structural legal issues to address here is rules that let banks off the hook for property taxes and reduce penalties for enforcement actions like the city has to come by and cut your three foot high grass for you. Yes I understand those legal exceptions exist to make underwriting easier by reducing the cost of ownership if the bank has to exercise their right to recover the collateral - Its a perfect example how 'helping people' by trying make home loans more affordable has unintended consequences. Rather than play tax games create more special carve outs and case - just treat ALL owners more equally.
Re:Material cost (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine Zillow don't take out insurance, they self insure. Maintenance and upkeep will be minimal too.
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Where, in the US, do banks get to avoid property taxes on foreclosed/acquired properties? Not around here.
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The difference with cars and food is that they are both depreciating assets.
Houses tend to appreciate even in poor condition, because the cost of fixing them up tends to be small compared to their total value.
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Where are you seeing falling home prices?
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The banks are preventing home prices from falling by refusing to sell properties at market value.
Zillow can't expect a bailout so they have to sell the properties for what they can afford.
We need to stop bailing out banks, and nationalizing them instead. A bank should never, ever get a bailout, because they don't employ enough people. But they are important, so when they fail they should be nationalized so that they can continue to operate.
If the banks sell the properties at market value then they take a lo
Re: Material cost (Score:4, Informative)
no, they don't belong to the state, so signing a blank check is not the same as nationalizing.
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The financial crisis bailouts were, for the most part, not "blank checks". The majority of them were share/equity purchases, so a part of the banks ended up belonging to the state.
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Bailing out banks IS effectively nationalizing them.
No, bailing out banks is the "socialize risk" part of the 1st Commandment of Capitalism: "Privatize profit, socialize risk"
The taxpayer is basically subsidizing executive bonuses at that point.
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Re:Material cost (Score:4, Informative)
The market in the Phoenix area is leveling, for close to two months, insignificant change. This was a relatively abrupt change, also.
Zillow paid too much, probably the algorithm calculating a consistent price increase. The market changed too quickly for it, and no one was watching.
ps - At least in the Phoenix area, bank-owned properties are moving quite well, and are less of the market than might be thought. The height of the bank-owned market might have been 2012-2014, post-08 crash properties finally being moved to clean up the books. I bought mine then from Freddie Mac, and on a Friday afternoon, at 4:45pm, in D.C., someone approved the deal. That is a measure of quiet desperation, to delay that coveted cocktail a few minutes to to accept an appraisal-value and market-value offer before closing the laptop and kissing all the stress goodbye for the weekend. It was the tail end of a terrible market. We don't see the volume of empty houses today, but back then some banks either negotiated rent or actually paid to have houses occupied where vandalism was the worst. The causes of all that I'll pass up on exploring here, but they offer us lessons.
Today it is not quite so frantic, the banks are not overhung with devalued properties and a soft lending market. But the heat is off, in much of the country. Economic prospects, near-term performance, and several arenas of unrest all are leading to the market softening, and I expect this to be nationwide. Phoenix is catching up a bit with rental units, so we can absorb the influx, and that means elsewhere someone (Cali?) is losing population, reducing price pressure there in both purchase and rental. That will cause disruptions also.
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lol wut? I take it you live in a moble home.... Houses appreciate over time, they dont depreciate unless you fail to care for them.
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Absolute nonsense. The only time houses depreceate is during the more severe recessions. A few years per century really.
And during both the big 2008 recession and during covid, houses prices still went up in my area. Which means the last time house prices went down where I am was the 1980s stock market crash , nearly 40 years ago.
Granted most places DID depreceate during that time, in almost everywhere in the world there are only two market
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In big cities, the perpetual increase is driven by lack of new land and urbanisation. So more people, same amount of land. Ergo, land price and whatever is on it goes up. In more successful nations, there's a significant additional factor of absolutely massive capital flight from PRC over last two decades, and Chinese elites invest in money because that's how Chinese culture works.
And if you stop pretending that things outside big cities don't exist (i.e. you go around urbanisation), you'll find a massive g
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Above should say "Chinese elites invest in land and housing"
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe it's different where you are. Around here houses appreciate rapidly, even in terrible condition. Have been doing so for decades, with only the occasional blip.
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Key words: "around here". You're an anglo urbanite, sitting at the end of century plus of non stop urbanisation.
Leave your city and go live in the middle of nowhere. No, not by your urban standards of "twenty clicks from the city" but in overwhelming majority of places that are not near a city.
You'll find a housing market that is completely different from one "around here".
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Material cost (Score:4, Interesting)
thats an oversimplification though. Even a building in rough shape can have a ton of value, for one thing building a new house from scratch costs a lot, having a foundation ready to go and walls and structure and support to work off of is huge. Second, in a lot of semi urban and suburban locations most houses are non conforming to current building allowances. When the land was subdivided around old houses the lots were often made small, in order to stop this trend from getting too extreme towns change the setback laws and such or make the minimum lot size bigger than most of the lots in the town making it impossible to further subdivide your lot... but what that means is that if the house were gone you might not be allowed to build the same size house on the lot. having a grandfathered in 3 foot setback on one side of a lot can mean the difference between being able to build a normal house vs just being able to build some minimal building with relatively little usable yard (7 foot setback) or no building at all 15 foot setback). There is value just in the fact that the house stands and is grandfathered in to previous lot line exclusions.
The real estate and flipping market is a complicated one and probably not something to be solved strictly via an algorithm.
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Who did you get that crazy idea from?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is that people can't hide and live in unused cars unnoticed. They also can't strip them of thousands of dollars in material without it being easily noticed, whereas if you know what you are doing you can strip the copper wiring out of a house without showing outside indications of it.
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This guy officer. This one right here.
Re: Material cost (Score:2, Insightful)
So many naive responses it's hard to fathom.
I +could+ give nearly countless examples of house prices dropping. But, I'll let the naive believe that it's an ever-more expensive commodity instead of a temporal, local specific demand that is driving the price.
It really is true, economics 101 should be mandatory. That and knowing a little history.
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Informative)
There's a cost to losing liquidity. If you have hundreds of millions tied up in real estate that takes at least 30 days to liquidate, you could end up in a real bind really fast depending on the debt structure behind those assets and assumptions made when taking on the debt, such as "we expect to have this flipped within 6 months to repay the bond, and thus have a huge balloon payment due in 6 months if we don't, that we won't be able to make without taking on more debt."
This is how real estate developers find themselves leveraged out the ass.
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I hope this does not affect my zillows 360 payment where they give me another 2% back after 60 days of closing on my house 60k over what everyone else offered me for it lol.
Re:Material cost (Score:5, Insightful)
In a perfect world, by the time you reach 65 your mortgage is paid off, and SS in conjunction with what you squirreled away will let you retire and live comfortably until you die. Two things threaten this like no other. 1) Inflation: When your spending power starts depleting because of rising cost of goods this grand plan comes under threat. 2) Rising property values outpacing inflation 50:1 threatens property taxes so extreme that by the time the mortgage is paid off the tax bill will be nearly that of the original mortgage, something not able to account for in a fixed income. The result? Mass homelessness among those now too old to re-enter the job market.
Congratulations America, you've created the dystopian society Logan's Run whereby old people are killed off for the crime of being old.
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The result [of home prices and property taxes rising drastically]? Mass homelessness among those now too old to re-enter the job market.
No, the result is someone selling their house for far more than it was worth when property taxes were lower. Then using that money to either buy or rent in a lower cost area, and pocketing the difference. It still isn't great that they cannot continue to live in the house where they built memories, but they aren't going to be homeless because of the issues you list.
The homeowner only gets into trouble if they stay in their home too long and deplete their savings paying for increasing property taxes which do
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so your solution is to move out to BFE where there is a gas station, a walmart, and dial-up internet? Wow, how altruistic you are. Fuck those old people, let them die out in the boonies where the country doctor is also the town vet.
Your hyperbole is unnecessary. I live in a fairly expensive town in the midwest suburbs ($600k average home price for context), but you don't have to go to a rural area to find affordable homes. There are two zip codes which border mine that both have homes which average closer to $300k, and there are plenty of condo / apartment complexes littered throughout these communities.
While I'm sure there are areas of the country where you cannot find any affordable housing in a 100 mile radius, I don't think that i
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Re: Material cost (Score:3)
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I *am* one of the "older people." The young people are right, although often they have the wrong reasons.
Historically, housing prices were flat in real terms. There's data in the US going back to the beginning of the US. Then in ~ 2003 they started to blast off. Land and housing are like any other primary resource: you want them as cheap as possible high primary resource prices are for economies because they require more capital investment. High shelter prices in particular are bad because it's capital tied
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There's no evidence for skyrocketing prices [in2013dollars.com] starting in 2003. According to the link, from 1967 to 2021 housing prices have gone up an average of 4.16% a year while overall inflation has averaged 3.94% a year - so almost flat for the whole time, including since 2003.
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Re:Material cost (Score:4, Insightful)
holding real estate is not like holding stocks. zillow has to pay property taxes and insurance on those homes along with maintenance costs
in some towns the local code people might use this as an opportunity to force a property to have more work done to fully comply with codes or they won't allow the deed to be transferred
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You're correct. And unlike stocks, houses rarely go to zero value.
In fact, one of the interesting bits of homeowner insurance is that it should never cover the entire fair market value of the home. Much of that value, often is in the land it sits on. And the land rarely burns away, requires substantial repairs, nor is stolen, except by fraud.
Yeah, if your house burns flat, the now-empty lot is still there. Waiting for a new home. And could be sold all by itself, if you wanted to move on.
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Homeowner insurance should cover a lot more than the rebuild/replacement value of a home. Granted, not a lot can make land unbuildable but a sink hole in the right spot, landslide, etc. could maybe do it.
But aside from rebuild costs, house insurance also covers the costs of everything inside - your clothes, appliances, etc. Some things insurance companies give fixed values to - a buddy lost maybe half of his house due to a fire, and computers were valued at $500 each w/o receipts/documentation, saltwate
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In fact, one of the interesting bits of homeowner insurance is that it should never cover the entire fair market value of the home. Much of that value, often is in the land it sits on. And the land rarely burns away, requires substantial repairs, nor is stolen, except by fraud.
In most areas of the country, you still get homeowner insurance for a value similar to the resell value. This is because the cost to build a new home is generally higher than its resell value (not too different than a car). And in most of the country your lot value is less than a quarter of your home's value, so the resell price of the lot + home is close enough to just the replacement cost of the home.
But if you live in an area where you have a $500k home on a $500k lot of land, you probably only need $600
Re: Material cost (Score:2)
They canâ(TM)t. They have cash tied up in the houses that they need
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It depends on taxes though. Spending 3k-4k/year on taxes is going to add up. They may pay more for materials, but if they just sit on a house then they might end up paying even more. If you are in the Snowbelt, then you are also probably paying for heating costs to prevent bursting pipes. I'd think it's unlikely that they've winterized each home.
People not computers (Score:5, Insightful)
the big speculation people needs to see an loss (Score:4, Insightful)
the big speculation people needs to see an big loss from time to time.
Re:the big speculation people needs to see an loss (Score:4)
Yes, this was absolutely a feel good story for me. Here you have one of the companies taking advantage of easy money from low interest rates to make homes less affordable, and actually paying a penalty for it. I'd bet these losses are really just slightly lowered profit from their overall behavior over the past couple years, but it's still good to see a little justice.
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I'd bet these losses are really just slightly lowered profit from their overall behavior over the past couple years, but it's still good to see a little justice.
6% loss is nothing compared to the gains in popular markets, even just this year alone.
Well ... (Score:3)
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I believe Nelson summed it up nicely [youtube.com].
Stop financialising everything you idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they end up holding the bag on this. Houses should be shelter, not a get rich quick scheme for leveraged speculators and people farmers. I don't stick money I can't lose into the share market/crypto, nor into investments that support modern slavery, but thanks to the banksters, I have no choice but to put the bulk of my income into their global leveraged housing ponzi rentier scheme.
If some of the hordes of institutions/investors get their fingers burnt from the covid bubble, it might shake some of them out of the market and leave it to those who actually need houses to, you know, live in.
Re:Stop financialising everything you idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
I kinda hope they do as well. For me personally, the bubble has worked out well. We bought our house in late 2019, right before the bubble started getting out of hand, and our place has appreciated more than $100K since then. That made it trivially easy to refinance at a lower interest rate (from an already ridiculously low rate) and to get out from under the PMI on our loan. I have no interest in selling my home right now, but I will happily take the $400 cut in my mortgage that the refi got me as a result of all the instant imaginary equity I got in the last year and a half.
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Except you wouldn't have been paying the extra $400 in the first place if housing hadn't become so unaffordable. That's the thing, they've tricked you into thinking the ponzi is a good thing by giving back part of what they've taken away.
Also you're now screwed if you need/want to move to a bigger house (children etc), because the relative gap has increased significantly.
The real beneficiaries are those who own multiple houses. But why should they get a special wealth infusion because a pandemic turns up? D
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Except you wouldn't have been paying the extra $400 in the first place if housing hadn't become so unaffordable.
Meh, not so much in our case. When we bought the place, we paid $235K for 4BR/2BA, about 2300 square feet with a brand-new steel roof, no HOA, and in a great neighborhood, so not particularly unaffordable for the size in this part of Florida. The current appraised value is an insane $340K+. The extra $400 we were paying came as a result of the PMI on the loan and the jump in property taxes (a
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Ah, but that fake dream is a powerful drug. Almost everybody I know insists they have to buy a house as quick as they can so they can "start paying their own mortgage instead of the landlord's." The bank is happy to approve enormous low interest loans, so there are bidding wars and inflating prices.
I'll almost feel bad when interest rates rise and everyone defaults.
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The majority of new mortgages are variable rate here.
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And yet in my country, the majority are variable rate.
There's a very strong reason to choose a variable rate: you can't afford the payments on a fixed rate.
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I don't know what the interest rates are by you, but in the middle of the US here, if you can't afford the fixed mortgage rates, you really can't afford a house at all.
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There is no profits in the home you live in, your house is a lifestyle expense.
That depends on whether property values in your area are rising fast enough that the increase is greater than the cost of maintenance, which is in turn the product of a large number of factors. Lots of people complain about how rising property values have increased their taxes, those people can sell their house at a profit and move someplace more like the neighborhood they live in was when they moved into it.
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So your house needs to double in value just to break even on transaction,
The consumer gets a home, yes, profits, highly unlikely.
This is a very sound financial analysis... for someone buying property on credit, and then let it sit idle.
You're super-minimizing that basically everyone who buys on credit is going to live in the house, (or rent the property out), not leave it idle. So while it's true that after thirty years you've paid perhaps double the offer price, you've also gotten a lot of value out of it, amazingly enough the value of having housing for 30 years. That has a financial value that drastically affects the math here.
Coi
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Houses should be shelter, not a get rich quick scheme for leveraged speculators and people farmers.
No disagreement that people should focus on buying houses for shelter. Investment gain, IMHO, should be second priority.
On the other hand, there's value to what Zillow is doing. One of the biggest pains in buying a house is contingent sales: I'll by your house but I have to sell my house first. It totally gums up the works. It's worth a lot to have someone come in with a bunch of capital to buffer the transaction and eliminate contingent sales.
I can also imagine it's a lot more efficient to have a company h
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Whether having a company or professional flippers "clean up and refrubish" is "efficient" or not depends greatly on your definition of efficiency.
If efficiency is defined as the speed at which the property gets refurbished then, yes, its efficient.
If efficiency is defined as having even the most tangential relationship to providing quality housing to people at fair prices, it is the opposite of efficiency.
My parents live in what has become a *highly* desirable suburb of Boston. The town is now a machine de
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What will be required is a willingness to LET BUSINESSES FAIL.
Capitalism, like evolution, benefits by weeding out the failures. Promoting concepts like "too big to fail"* is asinine political kick-the-can...sending it down the road for the future to deal with.
Yes, letting the investment firms fail would have been agony, and true financial ruin for lots of people who didn't deserve it. But like forest fires, the more you postpone them, the worse they're ultimately going to get.
Now we're 14 years down the
The model wasn't quite flipping. (Score:2)
Historically, there have been two quite different activities called "flipping":
1) buying distressed properties to fix up and resell, and
2) buying because the market is going up.
The first is socially and economically valuable, while the second is simply gambling, with the last flipper getting flopped. It's a manifestation of the "Greater Fool" theory, and the banks buying in caused the bubble fifteen years ago. [ok, they were forced to dip their toes in by the Clinton DOJ which threatened to prosecute them
Seize all assets of Duke and Duke... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Zillow should have never been allowed into the home buying business. They contributed nothing except driving up home prices.
I disagree. If you've ever been involved in a contingent sale you know how stressful they are. Having a third party front the cash for a few months is incredibly valuable.
I'd also be willing to pay something to have a company handle the clean up and renovate part, essentially being the general contractor and financer. I don't do that often enough to be very good at it and it's much easier to do when no one is living in the house. Having Zillow finance the operation makes life easier for the buyer and seller
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You're making an old argument - the market is either 'what buyers will pay' or 'what buyers think they need to pay'.
I believe in the former. Because if the market is 'what buyers think they need to pay' and they do not (interest rates too high, value not recognized, demand not sufficient to force purchase), well, the market was not, actually that after all. The 'market' is always what will be paid, not what was hoped for.
I've seen Zestimates used by my wife to explore refinancing, and yeah, it was bogus. Re
Should be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Speculation in a housing market should be illegal - it drives costs up for actual humans wanting housing.
The worst part is that normal owner occupiers must dump a huge proportion of their wealth (usually all of it) into this single 'asset class' and are further risk concentrated on a single house (i.e no market diversification). Its like an investor who just dump's their entire life earnings into shares in one company - with 10x leverage!
But unlike Zillow and Blackrock, owner occupiers have no choice but to make this crazy bet because prices are so absurd.
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Zillow was trying to do something other than speculation, which might have had some level of value-add maybe.
I have ended up with a second condo in my building that sits vacant now because quotes for a remodel came in at double what I had budgeted. Our plan was to upgrade the new unit, move into it, finish some repairs on our unit that need to be done with it vacant, and sell it. I expected the process to take a year, but it looks like I will have two units or at least three years at the current pace.
What I
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I understand that materials cost pandemic spike has gone back down. But you might do what zillow could do - become a landlord and rent out the unused property. (probably pre-remodel, or be real strict on damage)
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Speculation in a housing market should be illegal.
Cool. What's the clear, objective difference between speculation and acting as a market maker (where you temporarily own the asset so you can decouple buyers from sellers and keep the market liquid)?
Here's the thing: this is a good news story for everyone but Zillow investors. Net net, investors made a bet, lost, and now a bunch of people are buying houses subsidized by the investors. What a gift! And what it's going to do is teach the investors to be a bit more cautious as they discover the true value of t
Re:Should be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
If by market regulation you mean, "keep the government out of it", then yes.
This would be nice except for people. In every human endeavor, we see people who can follow basic social contracts overwhelmed by those who think norms of behavior don't apply to them. It's why we have laws in the first place. If assholes would stop shitting on everyone else, life would be oh-so peachy.
why i dont buy at auction anymore (Score:2)
What the article doesn't say (Score:5, Informative)
They're parasites. Soaking up money without providing any actual service or value. You can't have a free market when individual players have so much money they can directly manipulate the prices in the market like this.
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This is just Scalping in another form. Another self inserting middleman in it for money and no actual use otherwise.
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They were doing it because they have more data and higher quality data on houses, historical home prices, and local taxes than just about any other company in the US and were hoping to leverage that advantage into the buying of selling of houses.
F em (Score:2)
Good!!! (Score:2)
I was listening to a Marketplace podcast the other morning, and apparently Zillow did not even have enough contractors lined up to make repairs on the houses that needed them. I'm trying to understand how OUTBIDDING other bidders and buying a house at $X and then immediately relisting it at $X + $Y even makes sense. In what real estate market to you think you can OUTBID everyone else and then magically find buyers to pay an even higher price than the inflated price you paid? I wish I had a job with gobs of
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In what real estate market to you think you can OUTBID everyone else and then magically find buyers to pay an even higher price than the inflated price you paid?
Home prices are increasing, due to increasing scarcity. And buying up all the available homes and then sitting on them increases it further. And paying above market value for some properties can increase the value of other properties near it. So it's not impossible to make money this way, it's merely a risk... one which I hope destroys them, since the consequences of this business model for literally everyone else are negative.
Weren't they using AI/ML? (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
Flippers should be penalized. All they do is drive up costs without providing any benefit. Their work is shoddy and will inevitably lead to the owners having to spend thousands to correct issues.
The same with companies like Zillow which buy homes and deliberately keep them off the market to drive up costs.
There should be a law which says all homes must be listed within 30 days of acquisition by a realtor or similar entity. No holding to keep inventory low.
Relevance? (Score:2)
So the relevance to Slashdot is that they used an algorithm to buy houses automatically?
Yes?
That's it?
Really?
Everything uses an algorithm these days, from the coffee machine that makes your mocha latte, to the company that manages your retirement account. From the battery management system that determines how much current to send to the motor in your Tesla, to the machines that sort your Amazon packages. From the sawmill that cuts the lumber for the extension you recently put in your house, to the machine
Probably using AI (Artificial Ignorance) (Score:2)
And likely quite a bit of non-artificial cluelessness in addition.
Good! (Score:3)
I hope Zillow dies a hard death, along with all the other large rapacious companies that are making it impossible for both current and future generations to actually own homes. This 'great reset' mantra of "you will own nothing and you will be happy" needs a bullet through the brain, a stake through the heart, and a funeral pyre. Enough of this rental-only-leading-back-to-feudal-serfdom bullshit. If the elites want medieval, let's give them medieval - on our terms.
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How is this legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
If TDameritrade did that to stocks the FTC would be on them in a minute. How can Zillow, who has an unfair information advantage on the market both facilitate the transactions but also bid themselves. It gives them outsized power in manipulating housing prices.
Oh, dear.... (Score:2)
I've been saying for a bunch of years that zillow's sole purpose is for house-flippers, not people who want to buy a home (redfin works for that). They overvalue houses (using historical data, I looked at what they claimed my house in Chicago was worth when I had to sell it in '03, and they LIED, claiming it was worth 20% more (it wasn't, my real estate agent had done her due dilligence), and it claims the house I own now is 25% larger than the deed says it is.
I'm *so* sorry that they're losing money, after
"Slowing price appreciation" doesn't mean losing $ (Score:3)
It's realty, so it doesn't take that-sophisticated a mind to realize that "slowing growth" is not the same as "prices falling". When price increases go from 1.5% monthly to 1.3%, that's slowing growth. It's not taking a bath though.
And what are Zillow's total sale prices, not asking? Across all sales, not just those in one single city? One city does not tell the story of Zillow's balance sheet.
I'm even surprised to see Bloomberg published this article at all, it's not only inaccurate, it's also poorly researched.
Good. (Score:2)
Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Group. (Score:2)
These jackasses want to the the Ticketmaster Scalpers of people's homes. Fuck 'em. I hope they descend into bankruptcy and then somebody pees on their dinner.
Bigger Issue (Score:3)