What people don’t get is that you need some houses to sit empty. This allows people to find a place when they move. This allows people to move around within a territory.
Also not all secondary houses are bad. I want to buy a plot of land for a small farm and a place to go in case of hurricanes. Presently there is no house. Should I be taxed for improving land for personal ways that didn’t remove housing?
Many of the comments so far are emotional. We need to do better when making policies.
I’ve never done this so don’t know the answer, but when you build a house don’t you then also start to get government services in support of that house?
I would love to build houses but unfortunately, it costs about twice as much to build a new house or apartment building than it does to buy an old one and bring it up to date. That's not even including the zoning/permitting headaches of various municipalities.
(And to be clear, I'm not advocating for the abolishment of zoning/permitting, just that some municipalities make the process unreasonably hard/expensive just because they can.)
Putting on a heavy tax burden realted to the house price means that eventually, you get rich enough where its not even an inconvenience, and those people will have an even stronger cartel over land use
If an org really wants to profit from real estate, go build new homes, there is a huge shortage, we don't need to competes with rich companies when trying to purchase a house.