Housing is a basic human need, it shouldn’t be allowed to be only an investment. With the other items, you can just say “so don’t buy it”, which is not possible with housing, you have to pay for it, even of you wouldn’t like to.

The worst thing about this is that housing is essential, while all the other things aren't. Scalpers only take advantage of other people's shopping addiction, while these so-called "investors" take advantage of other people's basic needs.

They're all pieces of shit and deserve to be kicked out an airlock into deep space.

"Private Collector"

Scalper no Scalping!

There should be a hard limit of houses you can buy. Two by default (the one you live in and one you can rent to someone, maybe with a requirement that you need to live there occasionally) and an additional one for each child if he or she doesn't have one yet.

It always impresses me how much people worship landlords, even Canada up there is having a housing crisis but nobody dares question the sanctity of landlords. You can watch both the major parties arguing for hours and nobody ever brings up landlordism once. A lot of them choose to instead become hostile to immigrants, both parties moving further right on immigration because stopping immigration or potentially even kicking out immigrants to them is more acceptable than questioning the sanctity of landlords. You also saw a similar thing here in the USA, I remember after the Trump/Kamala debate when they revealed the plans for bringing housing prices down and Trump was "mass deportation" and Kamala was "a tax credit." Not sure about every country definitely here in US and Canada, people here treat landlords like unquestionable deities, the idea that their right to rule should even be called into question is not even something that passes through most people's heads.

At least in the case of fumos these days they're made-to-order. Buying 10 of them isn't snatching 10 of them from the carts of other potential buyers, it just means 10 more fumos will be made. If anything it's strictly increasing the supply and making them more accessible to people who couldn't make the preorder window.

This was absolutely not the case a few years ago, though. And just because you're technically not scalping doesn't mean you can't still wildly overcharge.

Seeing alot of touhou in the fediverse lately.

I think most of you are underestimating the cost of housing maintenance. We had some bad luck and a couple of structurally necessary renos were bigger than initially thought, or didn't address the issue as well as we hoped, requiring new renos. In the last 20 years we've paid the cost of our townhouse apartment once over, easy. And now the bathroom, kitchen, and flooring could use an upgrade (25-50 years old), which is again expensive. In that time its value has risen maybe 50%, not quite keeping pace with local inflation.

Not complaining, we bought it for living in and it's been great for that, and now that everything is at the end of its lifespan is a good time to really make it ours. But house prices aren't rising insanely everywhere, house upkeep isn't free (there are always "modifications"), and at least here the average ROI for being a landlord is abt 4-6%, same as stocks lately, and that's assuming no major surprises.

This is how I learn there's a lego death star now?