Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

Re:Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt by seanmcdirmid on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @11:36PM (#29090857)

Vancouver is the 4th densest city in North America (> 250k people). They have plenty of multi-story condos/apartment buildings, they also had these 30 years ago (as a kid growing up in Seattle, I would always marvel at how dense Vancouver was compared to our city in the south). So while sure, Vancouver could become even more dense until speculators had enough of the market (same thing happened in the late 1980s during the Japanese bubble, Vancouver got burned for it in the 90s), they are already doing plenty well comparatively.

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Re:Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt by dionidium on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:01AM (#29090983)

I'm I guess what you would call a supply and demand absolutist. There's no "correct" amount of development or "optimal" level of density (wrt prices, I mean; obviously people have preferences). If you let demand outpace supply, then you should expect the available market-rate housing to increase in price. (And that's true even if you think your city is building a lot, or if you think it's already really dense, or if you think it already has a lot of people and big buildings, and so on.)

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Re:Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt by seanmcdirmid on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @01:05AM (#29091286)

There are limits to how many people land can carry. Vancouver builds up onto a mountain, which is crazy. Yes, for some price, we could terrace the mountain or even remove it.

Vancouver is a boom bust town for real estate, now it is in a boom, it will bust eventually, just like it has many times before. There is just too much speculation going on to represent stable demand.

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Re:Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt by rsj_hn on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @01:09AM (#29091301)

This is the difference between constrained and unconstrained areas. For example, San Francisco is a constrained area since it's already bounded by other cities and can only increase housing by building higher or getting rid of parks.

But the San Francisco bay is quite unconstrained, with extremely low population density and massive undeveloped tracts all over. Here, only regulation and laws prevent the cities from becoming bigger.

In general, the vast majority of people live in unconstrained areas, not constrained areas. But because constrained areas are where you get the windfall wealth from housing, people in the physically unconstrained areas clamor to make themselves legally a constrained area by making it illegal for the city to grow out.

So yes, there are limits, but these are political limits, not physical or environmental limits, and they are driven by incumbent owners with dollar signs in their eyes, not concern over nature.

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Re:Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt by dionidium on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @11:15AM (#29095850)

Sorry to have to keep disagreeing, but we are nowhere near any geological limits in Vancouver. As I pointed out above, most of the city is still composed of single-family homes. It's not just that it's not all massive towers. It's not even duplexes or quad-plexes or small apt complexes. It's low-rise bungalows on single-family-only lots.

There's tons of space in the Vancouver metro to add density. The issue is that it's illegal.

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