[quote=scruffydog]Does anybody notice that .gov is slowly trying to take away private property rights / negate rental contracts? Why does .gov give billions to big business for covid relief but almost nothing to landlords and then make it almost impossible to evict tenants? Rent control never made any sense to me; restricting return on private investment. If you bought Apple stock for $5 how would you like it if .gov mandated you could only sell it for $10 instead of $150?
Responses to my post are generally “So far I’m not affected so I don’t care”. I believe it will only get more difficult for rental property owners. I wouldn’t enter the rental business now.
Rents popped earlier this year in local areas I track. Looking at Zillow I have noticed recent sfr rent price reductions. Sales are still strong, very little inventory in 92124. Out of control in Canada – median up 54% in London On in 2 yrs. Toronto most overvalued in North America. Crazy times.[/quote]
California can propose as many property rights restrictions as it wants via Propositions. It’s up to the voters to decide. Outside of California, I don’t think the challenge to property rights is as bad as people make it out to be.
Even in CA, most of the property rights challenges that are really out of wack such as state mandated rent control are coming from the far left progressives, which probably feel more empowered these days given that CA has a supermajority in both chambers of the government. As soon as that supermajority is broken, we can probably get back to some normalcy. It will happen. If you lived long enough in CA, things don’t stay far one way or the other very long. It takes some time, but the pendulum do swing back to somewhere in the center eventually.
Imho it’s generally a bad idea to let politics and fear of taxes get in the way of investments. Just as much I think it would be naive to think that some additional taxes can’t possibly be passed, it’s probably equally naive to think given with the new constraint or taxes, one can’t make money off of rentals. The taxes aren’t currently the problem. The problem right now is that given how hot the housing market still is in SoCal and San Diego, it’s still difficult for properties bought now to pencil out nicely.
That would be like saying…Oh, well eventually the government is going to dip into people’s Roth 401k/Roth IRA (which could very well be true)….so lets not put any money into a Roth IRA/401k….I’m pretty confident if you do that, you and your retirement account will regret it 20-30 years from now.
I view this differently. I think that if the perception of investing becomes more difficult for a given asset categories, fewer determined people will look into doing it. And with fewer people looking to do it, there’s less competition…Afterall, most people get easily discouraged…
