Cornering the market on an entire city seems prohibitively expensive but hey, maybe somebody will roll in with a trillion dollar investment that has massive downside someday.
How is that going to make them money? They would have to withdraw enough units to raise the market price across an entire city -- and forego the rent on all of those.
That kind of thing only makes sense if the city is imposing some kind of rent control or similar so they can't rent them out for the market rate and start getting weird incentives for rich people accounting chicanery.
I'd love it if these developments would grant equity to its tenants. But then they'd just squat on the land, making it useless.
Is this really the best of all possible worlds, where a small number of investment groups with vast wealth can keep accumulating the core real estate of cities, to extract wealth from its citizens?
They they bought the parcels for 500 bucks a piece. Each parcel is bound to have similar recent sales from the pool of 5999. If it seems expensive to challenge for a well funded investor, it's not exactly cheap for a city that's bankrupt.
That has definitely happened before in robber baron days.
I'm curious, has it really happened at a city level? Seems to me that it would get prohibitively expensive, since other owners would see the massive demand and push up the prices, but that's really just a supposition.
Why should the city buy them back? They sold the assets, they have no obligation to re-purchase them. Investment risk is in the hands of those people (usually companies) who purchase them. Besides, at what price would they even buy them back at? They're certainly not worth the price that some people pay for them (last I checked, about $1M each).
I think if this was the case, wealthier people would swoop in and buy them up by the dozen, then rent them out for triple their mortgage. They would all be sold in bulk before the builder broke ground. Capitalism is very kind to those who already have capital.
I don't think they buy all their property. In Boston they have four locations and are planning a fifth but they're all rented / leased from property mgmt firms.
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