Pension funds, investment firms and Wall Street banks are snapping up family homes in Europe and the United States at a rapid pace as prices rocket higher, looking for alternatives to lockdown-hit office parks and shopping malls, and betting that a permanent increase in remote working following the coronavirus pandemic will keep demand for suburban houses elevated.
“If institutions help build new homes, that should bring purchase prices and rents down.
We’ve already written numerous times about the lengths to which house hunters are driven, paying excessively over asking price.
Housing prices are rising faster than US incomes, squeezing out new buyers who can’t afford the buy-in.
If millennials — “Generation Rent” — aren’t going to buy their own houses, they represent a long-term income opportunity to whoever owns the homes they’re living in.
Investors represented a quarter of all homes sold in the US during the first three months of this year, according to one estimate Ziady cites, and while that includes individual investors and people buying vacation homes, it also includes Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase.
The dry cleaner by the office and the coffee shop around the corner all count on workers who have been largely absent for nearly a year and a half.
Less commuting, however, might be the right thing to do.
“We’ve adopted a permanent hybrid model, which means that employees have access to office infrastructure but are not required to use it every day,” he writes.
We’ve got explanations for the shortages of tacos, coffee, cars, jet fuel, computer chips, Nike shoes and school supplies.
This is the highest it’s been since July 4 and a 28% increase over last week’s pace.
Former President Barack Obama is catching some criticism for holding a 60th birthday party on Martha’s Vineyard — even though the spread there is “moderate” rather than “high” and the party will be held outdoors.
“The so-called Delta variant of the coronavirus and the threat of an unconstitutionally-motivated restriction” hangs over the Calvary Chapel of Bangor, Maine, “like a sword of Damocles,” its lawyers argued in the petition.