The real estate market is not like most other markets in that the turnover of "inventory" is very low. Any speculation, foreign or otherwise, can have a huge effect on the price. On top of that, you can't just create a new livable house or apartment out of thin air, so it takes time for the supply to catch up to demand even setting aside zoning and other considerations. Conversely, if everyone tries to leave a single market at the same time, the price can also drop very quickly relative to what they paid for it.

Rent is a strict substitute for buying property so the rental prices in most cases track the real estate prices fairly closely. In fact, rental prices tend to change much faster than property as rent can be raised every year while a mortgage doesn't necessarily change once the sale has been finalized.

Here are some recent new articles dealing with this issue.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/new-zealand-foreigners-buy...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/wealthy-chinese-bu...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahsu/2016/10/31/chinese-inve...

And here's an article talking about a study done in Vancouver indicating these activities are driving rent prices too high:

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/out-o...

Making assumptions about people because they say something that doesn't fit your world view is just as dangerous as xenophobia itself.

It's not anti-foreigner, it's anti-speculation. It's easy to see that home purchase prices are well beyond what any reasonable family would want to pay, and yet the prices keep rising. The problem isn't that it's foreign money coming in, it's that there's so much of it.

Well it's either greedy, scheming tech workers or greedy, scheming Chinese speculators. Isn't there a pattern here? The problem simply must be caused by powerful, scheming outsiders. Despite lack of evidence, as this comment is a great example, defying the claim of lack of such by GP as if it simply hadn't been heard.

A lot of it is greedy, scheming local slumlords, to be honest.

If we abolished Prop 13 statewide, did some minor up-zoning throughout the Bay Area (and had more mixed use zones), made new housing easier to construct (less drawn out process for people to block development, etc.), reduced parking requirements, worked on improving public transit, and taxed unlived-in buildings [or better, switched toward land-value taxes], did more planning at a regional rather than municipal level, we could take a lot of incremental bites out of the housing quagmire.

Unfortunately most of those are politically infeasible.

Yes, I think the largest property owner in the US is Blackstone, a private equity firm that bought the property at the downturn.

From a strictly economic perspective they are helping increase demand when it was low and increase supply later on. They got rewarded for that.

How does owning a property increase it's supply? I'm not an economist, but I think you have got to build houses to make more of them.

If the zoning laws werent there, they would be building new buildings(like they currently do in china. Hence the term ghost cities) instead of investing in overpriced existing stock.

That's not always the case. In places like SF, the only way to build is up, which is expensive, requires alot of capital, and is risky by itself even if you don't have NIMBY people fighting it. In this case, Monopoly has it exactly right as far as the costs and values of putting a new hotel on Boardwalk vs. putting 4 hotels on Mediterranean Ave.

What data do you have that building a high rise in San Francisco is financially risky? To the contrary cities like San Francisco is a gold mine for rent seeking as there is such a pent up demand for housing after many decades of under building and the rents are so high that building a high rise is unlikely to carry much risk at all compared to other asset classes.

> the only way to build is up, which is expensive, requires a lot of capital, and is risky by itself

inherently more risky than building up in any other city, like NY or HK?

>Rising rents are almost entirely because of local restrictions on creating more housing.

If those restrictions are a constant, then foreign purchases can still play a huge role in pent up demand.

Plus, there are limits to how much you can (and want to) built. You don't want to cover every inch of land with buildings, or grow into sprawling third-world style megacities...

And low interest rates. There is a complex dynamic between the decision to buy vs rent and a prolonged low interest rate can lead to expectations of rising housing prices, which lead to a boom cycle.

perhaps not directly, but you have to have some debt to back all the us t-bills that you are printing to make your int'l balance of payments seem credible and prevent the dollar from collapsing..

see also: freddie mac / high tuition / yadda