Good salary, years of saving, still no home to show for it

Thailand's property debate has been about foreigners, their villas, their companies, their grievances. But the story that actually decides Thailand's future is the young Thai family that wants to own a home and keeps hitting a wall that has nothing to do with any foreigner.

Let us paint the picture. She is 28, works in an office in Bangkok, earns a respectable salary, and has been saving for years. She has done everything right, and she has accepted that she will probably never own a home in the city where she was born.

She is not unusual. She is the typical young Thai, and arguably the most important person in Thailand's property story. Yet, while the country argued about foreigners losing beach villas, almost nobody mentioned her. Here are the numbers that explain why her door is closing.

The number that should worry Thailand more than any villa raid

A median home in Bangkok now costs more than 30 times the average annual household income. In most developed economies, a price-to-income ratio above five is considered severely unaffordable, and above seven is treated as a crisis. 

On the most recent Numbeo data, Bangkok sits above 30. Measured against local earnings, Bangkok ranks among the least affordable major cities in the world, more stretched than London or New York.

Even if she saves enough, she still has to clear the bank. Thai lenders reject roughly 40 to 45% of mortgage applications. For homes under three million baht, the bracket most first-time buyers actually shop in, the rejection rate climbs as high as 70%. 

She finds a modest home she can just about afford, applies for the loan, and seven times out of ten, the answer is no. The home was never the real barrier. The financing is.

The reason banks are so cautious is the country's debt load. Thai household debt sits near 88% of GDP, the highest in Southeast Asia and well past the 80% threshold the Bank for International Settlements flags as a drag on growth. 

Around 77% of that debt is consumption debt, credit cards, car loans, and personal loans, rather than productive investment. Among Thais aged 25 to 29, more than a quarter already hold at least one non-performing loan before reaching peak earning age. A generation is arriving at the housing market, already flagged as risky by the lenders, and it needs to say yes.

The response has been predictable. Roughly two-thirds of younger Thais, Gen Z and millennials, now rent rather than buy, and a majority told one 2026 survey they have no plans to buy within five years. Perhaps the starkest figure: almost four in ten Thais surveyed this year said they would rather have been born in 1975, when life felt more affordable. 

That is not a property statistic. It is a generation registering that the door their parents walked through has swung shut.

Where the crackdown's energy has actually gone

Set those numbers beside the story that dominated the news, and the mismatch is hard to ignore. Even as Thailand's housing market grinds through its fourth straight year of decline, driven largely by Thai buyers being priced out, foreign demand has stayed resilient. 

The Phuket villa market that fills the headlines is largely insulated from the affordability crisis facing locals, because it runs on lifestyle money and foreign currency that isn't affected by what a Bangkok office worker earns.

The part of the market full of foreigners is doing fine. The part full of Thais is in its fourth year of decline. Yet nearly all the policy attention, the raids, the summonses, the headlines, have gone toward the part that was already doing fine.

The crackdown is often framed as protecting Thai land and Thai homes. But it's worth asking directly: what does seizing a foreigner's villa in Phuket do for a 28 year old in Bangkok whose mortgage application just got rejected? 

It adds no affordable homes to the supply in Greater Bangkok. It approves no first-time mortgages. It doesn't move the price-to-income ratio, touch household debt, or loosen a single lending rule. She is in the same position the morning after a raid as she was the morning before it.

Two markets sharing one word

Much of the confusion in this debate comes from two very different markets sharing the label "property." On one side sit resort villas in Phuket and Samui, luxury condos held through layered nominee structures, and second homes bought with foreign lifestyle money, the top of the market, and the crackdown's focus. 

On the other side sit affordable townhouses and starter condos in the suburbs and provincial cities, the homes young Thai families actually buy, financed, if at all, through a domestic mortgage that gets harder to secure each year.

These two markets barely intersect. Different buyers, different price points, different financing, different drivers. Removing a beach villa from foreign ownership does nothing to the supply or affordability of a suburban townhouse. 

But because both are labelled "property," the two are often treated as one fight, as though every enforcement action against a foreign-linked structure were automatically a win for a priced-out Thai family. The two are largely unconnected.

Our 28 year old doesn't feature on the luxury side of that divide at all. She is trying to buy a one-bedroom unit in a suburb on a single salary, and what stands between her and that home is not a foreigner in a beach villa. It's the gap between the price of an affordable home and the size of the mortgage a bank is willing to approve. No enforcement action closes that gap.

A solvable problem

The demand side of the equation is intact and durable; Thai families want to own homes, which is arguably the most valuable asset any housing market can have. What's missing is supply at the right price point and credit reaching the right buyers. 

Closing those two gaps could move a significant number of Thai families from renting to owning, our 28 year old among them. Three solutions stand out, and none require anything new to be invented.

1. Build supply where it's actually needed. The affordable segment, homes priced for median incomes, is chronically under-built because developers rationally chase the higher margins available in luxury property. 

Making affordable housing worthwhile, through planning and zoning that favour it, better access to land, and incentives tied to delivering homes that ordinary Thais can buy rather than luxury condos that sit empty, would help redirect the industry toward where the unmet demand actually is.

2. Open lending carefully. The mortgage bottleneck is the real choke point, but the fix isn't reckless loosening, which risks building the next debt crisis. It means precision: well-underwritten access aimed at creditworthy first-time buyers, transfer-fee relief, sensible loan-to-value treatment, and targeted first-home lending schemes that let a solid young family clear the bar without lowering it for everyone else. Thailand has used these tools before. The task now is to sharpen and better target them.

3. Channel foreign capital rather than expel it. This is where the foreign ownership debate reconnects, not as a threat, but as part of the answer. A clear, well-designed legal route for foreign ownership, built around high price floors, a foreign-buyer levy, designated zones and primary-residence rules, does two things at once. 

It keeps foreign money contained within the luxury and resort tier, where it does no harm to local affordability. And a levy on those purchases generates revenue that could be directed toward affordable housing and first-buyer support. 

Done well, foreign capital shifts from being treated as the problem to becoming part of the funding for the fix, an opportunity that enforcement-only approaches leave on the table.

The bigger picture

This series began with a contradiction: Thailand opening to business with one hand while tightening its grip on property with the other. The second piece looked at the trust problem underneath that, the sense that nobody believes the rules will hold. This piece points to something both of those circled without quite naming: while the country argues about foreigners, the property story that will actually shape Thailand's future is unfolding among its own people.

Underneath the more visible fight between foreign ownership and enforcement is a more consequential set of issues. A generation of Thai families who want to own homes. A supply gap exactly where affordable homes should be. A lending market that keeps saying no to people who might otherwise qualify. And a pool of foreign capital that could, with better design, help fund part of the fix.

So the question worth ending on is simple. What is Thailand doing to build the homes its own families want, and to lend them the money to buy them? What is it doing for the office worker who earns well, plays by the rules, and still watches the door close? That question has little to do with any foreigner, and it may be the one that actually decides what kind of country Thailand becomes.

Originally published on The Thaiger - Part 3 of 8.

*Analysis, not legal or financial advice. Figures on house-price-to-income ratio, mortgage approval rates, household debt, and buyer sentiment are drawn from publicly reported 2024-2026 data from the Bank of Thailand, the Bank for International Settlements, REIC, Numbeo, and major Thai research centres and surveys, and are summarised for clarity.

I doubt that the average price to income ratio in developed countries is just 5 or 7. This figure is completely wrong.

I would encourage the young lady to be patient.

A generation of older foreigners who are passing on are not being replaced.

The authorities are seizing property from foreigners.

There is a constant oversupply coming onto the market.

Investors are pulling out or / detouring Thailand.

The tourists are now heading to Vietnam.

Thailand is slowly being seen as an undesirable place to retire to.

The list goes on.

There will be a market correction in property in the future.

10 hours ago, KhunHeineken said:

I would encourage the young lady to be patient.

A generation of older foreigners who are passing on are not being replaced.

The authorities are seizing property from foreigners.

There is a constant oversupply coming onto the market.

Investors are pulling out or / detouring Thailand.

The tourists are now heading to Vietnam.

Thailand is slowly being seen as an undesirable place to retire to.

The list goes on.

There will be a market correction in property in the future.

That could have been written by Leaver.

Seems banks don't want to lend as people are too risky

This is not only a Thai problem, it is happening in many many counties these days.

Young people leave home, get a good job, and a decade or so later move back in with parents so they can save money to buy a dwelling.

BS ... Live with your choices.

Daughter done Uni, and put in her time & effort, during covd, while in Uni even though they suspended the intern requirement. She interned with Lazada for 6 months, unpaid, yea, they took advantage of that ... BUT, it paid off for both of them.

They hired her at 30k a month, less than 1 yr, up to 50k a month, although got knock back down to ~40k, as some were abusing OT rules. Within 2 yr there, she bought a townhouse, just shy of 3M, with crappy mortgage from builder, to qualify.

No assist from me at all. What she didn't do after Uni, was buy a new car with payments more than a mortgage. She used BTS, to commute to work, which was 12-16 hrs a day at times.

Changed jobs a few times, and refianced townhouse to a real mortage, since making more now, and even has scheduled extra principle payments. At that signing, house paid off in 18 yrs, if paying extra monthly, or profit monthly, if just basic mortage payment.

Lazada tried to recruit her back, no thanks, screw me once was enough.

Changed jobs again, better pay & work hours (normal), and now with even more additional priinciple payment, townhouse may be paid off in 10 yrs. She rents it out. No profit, all extra goes back into the investment.

Her fiancé, same, out of Uni, and bought nice condo in nice area. Chinese docs rent most of the units, next to hospital, again, an investment. No assist from family.

He drives a scooter, no flash car. Now my daughter has an EV, no petral cost, and the townhouse is rented out, so she doesn't need to pay a mortgage, same as condo. Even though buying condo & townhouse, they rented an inexpensive small condo, in older complex, close to work to cut monthly expenses.

No flash life, even though she's knocking on 100k a month, and he had decent salary also. Actually he just quit his banking accounting (auditing) job, and is concentrating or RE. She also has an online site to sell clothes.

They don't borrow money an depreciating toys, they don't try to impress their friends with fancy meals & coffee shops, they live within their means and are building equity.

Chip off the ol' block. Struggle till you don't have to, that's how you succeed financially. They want to retire before 50, comfortably, but squeeze in some fun. Such as a holiday in JP recently, and she took a business trip to CN to source better clothes vendors.

LIVE WITH YOUR CHOICES ... don't cry about em.

Same with every generation, worldwide. Opportunities are there, just need to use them.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by KhunLA

15 hours ago, msbkk said:

I doubt that the average price to income ratio in developed countries is just 5 or 7. This figure is completely wrong.

That sounds about right to me. What do you think it is?

15 hours ago, CharlieH said:

Good salary, years of saving, still no home to show for it

Thought I was reading an Australian article.

Average price for a house an Australia house, around one million dollars.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by SAFETY FIRST

15 hours ago, msbkk said:

I doubt that the average price to income ratio in developed countries is just 5 or 7. This figure is completely wrong.

Depends on location. In US Calif bay area it's probably 10x but just a 100 miles away it's more like 6X for a pretty nice house.

15 hours ago, CharlieH said:

Yet, while the country argued about foreigners losing beach villas, almost nobody mentioned her. Here are the numbers that explain why her door is closing.

IMHO these two are entirely separate and shouldn't appear in the same story. Thai people scamming Foreigners out of billions of Baht is a criminal case, young Thai people unable to buy homes is the failure of successive incompetent and corrupt governments.

1 minute ago, Peter Crow said:

Thai people unable to buy homes is the failure of successive incompetent and corrupt governments.

Failure of managing your available finances. Doesn't change generation after generation. Same rules apply.

Gets some decent income, go flash, you fail, banks win. Go low key, long hours, hard work, live within means, slowly develop equity, you get ahead of the curve, you win.

Doesn't matter where, what country, when, what decade, failures and successes are repeated over & over, and with people with meager beginnings, or even born with that silver spoon. Anyone can succeed, and anyone can fail.

People need to be taught how to manage their finance for the future, not enjoy themselves while trying to impress family and friends, with possessions & lifestyle, they can't afford, if wanting to build equity.

2 simple rules ....

... if you can't pay cash, you can't afford it now

... don't borrow money to buy depreciating toys

Edited July 19Jul 19 by KhunLA

Sucks to live in Bangkok. Houses in Chiang Mai can be bought for 2.5M THB or around $75K USD which is affordable. That same woman in the article could easily purchase a home in Chiang Mai. She should take her skills to Chiang Mai or some other place in Thailand other than expensive Bangkok.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by metisdead
Off topic comments about the USA has been edited out.

Just now, connda said:

Sucks to live in Bangkok. Houses in Chiang Mai can be bought for 2.5M THB or around $75K USD which is affordable. That same woman in the article could easily purchase a home in Chiang Mai. She should take her skills to Chiang Mai or some other place in Thailand other than expensive Bangkok.

Try going to the US where the median home price is $440,000 or 14.3M THB. Most "young people" are totally priced out of a home in the US.

You know many workers in the US who make 700 USD a month? My wife recently joined the Thai civil service, she earns 2% of my last salary, 6% of my present pension, gross to gross.... IMHO, cost of living wise, that 20000 Baht should be at least 60000, unless this happens "the middle income trap" will remain firmly shut.

1 hour ago, jas007 said:

That sounds about right to me. What do you think it is?

It depends in which country and location you live in. Nearly 19 years of income to buy a home? Europe's least affordable housing markets

Australia is one more example for unaffordability.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by msbkk

7 hours ago, scubascuba3 said:

That could have been written by Leaver.

Seems banks don't want to lend as people are too risky

Huh?

My opinion comes from a variety of sources, the main one being Thailand's record household debt.

https://www.nationthailand.com/blogs/news/policy/40065958

Then, you have stagnant wages.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/3272815/average-thai-household-income-declined-in-2025

People in the west are working longer because they can not afford to retire.

Just one article out of many from my home country, Australia. That means as the expat retirees passing away are not being replaced at the same rate as in the past, which equal vacant premises.

https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/retirement-on-hold-for-older-aussies-20250918-p5zh35.html

Vietnam experiencing record tourism.

https://news.tuoitre.vn/vietnam-tourism-sets-twin-records-in-international-arrivals-in-may-first-5-months-103260604120857023.htm

The over supply of housing.

https://www.nationthailand.com/business/property/40067711

Crackdown on foreign ownership in Thailand.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/3274640/thai-property-crackdown-foreign-buyers-hit-pause-on-villas

Foreign investment leaving Thailand.

https://www.nationthailand.com/business/economy/40065136

I think that about covers all the points I have made.

Are the above links fake news?

Can you post any links to counter the above?

Off topic posts and replies about median home prices in the USA have been removed.

For the Thai office worker unable to buy a house, she needs to lower her sights. I have Thai relatives who live in the Bangkok suburbs scattered around the IMPACT arena area. When we drive out to visit them from central Bangkok, I see new condo projects starting around 2MB. She needs to be realistic regarding her situation and she should be looking at a small condo in her salary price range, not a house she can't afford.

As others have mentioned, this situation is not unique to Thailand. When I lived in the US, my salary was low and housing was pricey in my area. I was realistic and realized that I would never own a house there--and I never did. The most I could afford on my salary was a 1-bedroom condo--and even that was a stretch, eating up probably half of my monthly salary. At one point I took a second job to make ends meet--you do what you need to do. But, the smartest thing I ever did financially was trading my renting of a 1-bedroom apartment--paying the landlord--to buying a similar 1-bedroom condo--and paying myself, instead.

The reality is that not everyone will be able to afford a house, just as the reality is that not everyone will be able to afford a BMW. True not just in Thailand. That's life and you deal with it--making the right budget choices you need to make depending on your situation. The sooner the office girl realizes this and resets her sights to her reality, the better off she will be.

Edited July 20Jul 20 by newnative
typo

On 7/18/2026 at 5:56 PM, CharlieH said:

Good salary, years of saving, still no home to show for it

Thailand's property debate has been about foreigners, their villas, their companies, their grievances. But the story that actually decides Thailand's future is the young Thai family that wants to own a home and keeps hitting a wall that has nothing to do with any foreigner.

Let us paint the picture. She is 28, works in an office in Bangkok, earns a respectable salary, and has been saving for years. She has done everything right, and she has accepted that she will probably never own a home in the city where she was born.

She is not unusual. She is the typical young Thai, and arguably the most important person in Thailand's property story. Yet, while the country argued about foreigners losing beach villas, almost nobody mentioned her. Here are the numbers that explain why her door is closing.

The number that should worry Thailand more than any villa raid

A median home in Bangkok now costs more than 30 times the average annual household income. In most developed economies, a price-to-income ratio above five is considered severely unaffordable, and above seven is treated as a crisis. 

On the most recent Numbeo data, Bangkok sits above 30. Measured against local earnings, Bangkok ranks among the least affordable major cities in the world, more stretched than London or New York.

Even if she saves enough, she still has to clear the bank. Thai lenders reject roughly 40 to 45% of mortgage applications. For homes under three million baht, the bracket most first-time buyers actually shop in, the rejection rate climbs as high as 70%. 

She finds a modest home she can just about afford, applies for the loan, and seven times out of ten, the answer is no. The home was never the real barrier. The financing is.

The reason banks are so cautious is the country's debt load. Thai household debt sits near 88% of GDP, the highest in Southeast Asia and well past the 80% threshold the Bank for International Settlements flags as a drag on growth. 

Around 77% of that debt is consumption debt, credit cards, car loans, and personal loans, rather than productive investment. Among Thais aged 25 to 29, more than a quarter already hold at least one non-performing loan before reaching peak earning age. A generation is arriving at the housing market, already flagged as risky by the lenders, and it needs to say yes.

The response has been predictable. Roughly two-thirds of younger Thais, Gen Z and millennials, now rent rather than buy, and a majority told one 2026 survey they have no plans to buy within five years. Perhaps the starkest figure: almost four in ten Thais surveyed this year said they would rather have been born in 1975, when life felt more affordable. 

That is not a property statistic. It is a generation registering that the door their parents walked through has swung shut.

Where the crackdown's energy has actually gone

Set those numbers beside the story that dominated the news, and the mismatch is hard to ignore. Even as Thailand's housing market grinds through its fourth straight year of decline, driven largely by Thai buyers being priced out, foreign demand has stayed resilient. 

The Phuket villa market that fills the headlines is largely insulated from the affordability crisis facing locals, because it runs on lifestyle money and foreign currency that isn't affected by what a Bangkok office worker earns.

The part of the market full of foreigners is doing fine. The part full of Thais is in its fourth year of decline. Yet nearly all the policy attention, the raids, the summonses, the headlines, have gone toward the part that was already doing fine.

The crackdown is often framed as protecting Thai land and Thai homes. But it's worth asking directly: what does seizing a foreigner's villa in Phuket do for a 28 year old in Bangkok whose mortgage application just got rejected? 

It adds no affordable homes to the supply in Greater Bangkok. It approves no first-time mortgages. It doesn't move the price-to-income ratio, touch household debt, or loosen a single lending rule. She is in the same position the morning after a raid as she was the morning before it.

Two markets sharing one word

Much of the confusion in this debate comes from two very different markets sharing the label "property." On one side sit resort villas in Phuket and Samui, luxury condos held through layered nominee structures, and second homes bought with foreign lifestyle money, the top of the market, and the crackdown's focus. 

On the other side sit affordable townhouses and starter condos in the suburbs and provincial cities, the homes young Thai families actually buy, financed, if at all, through a domestic mortgage that gets harder to secure each year.

These two markets barely intersect. Different buyers, different price points, different financing, different drivers. Removing a beach villa from foreign ownership does nothing to the supply or affordability of a suburban townhouse. 

But because both are labelled "property," the two are often treated as one fight, as though every enforcement action against a foreign-linked structure were automatically a win for a priced-out Thai family. The two are largely unconnected.

Our 28 year old doesn't feature on the luxury side of that divide at all. She is trying to buy a one-bedroom unit in a suburb on a single salary, and what stands between her and that home is not a foreigner in a beach villa. It's the gap between the price of an affordable home and the size of the mortgage a bank is willing to approve. No enforcement action closes that gap.

A solvable problem

The demand side of the equation is intact and durable; Thai families want to own homes, which is arguably the most valuable asset any housing market can have. What's missing is supply at the right price point and credit reaching the right buyers. 

Closing those two gaps could move a significant number of Thai families from renting to owning, our 28 year old among them. Three solutions stand out, and none require anything new to be invented.

1. Build supply where it's actually needed. The affordable segment, homes priced for median incomes, is chronically under-built because developers rationally chase the higher margins available in luxury property. 

Making affordable housing worthwhile, through planning and zoning that favour it, better access to land, and incentives tied to delivering homes that ordinary Thais can buy rather than luxury condos that sit empty, would help redirect the industry toward where the unmet demand actually is.

2. Open lending carefully. The mortgage bottleneck is the real choke point, but the fix isn't reckless loosening, which risks building the next debt crisis. It means precision: well-underwritten access aimed at creditworthy first-time buyers, transfer-fee relief, sensible loan-to-value treatment, and targeted first-home lending schemes that let a solid young family clear the bar without lowering it for everyone else. Thailand has used these tools before. The task now is to sharpen and better target them.

3. Channel foreign capital rather than expel it. This is where the foreign ownership debate reconnects, not as a threat, but as part of the answer. A clear, well-designed legal route for foreign ownership, built around high price floors, a foreign-buyer levy, designated zones and primary-residence rules, does two things at once. 

It keeps foreign money contained within the luxury and resort tier, where it does no harm to local affordability. And a levy on those purchases generates revenue that could be directed toward affordable housing and first-buyer support. 

Done well, foreign capital shifts from being treated as the problem to becoming part of the funding for the fix, an opportunity that enforcement-only approaches leave on the table.

The bigger picture

This series began with a contradiction: Thailand opening to business with one hand while tightening its grip on property with the other. The second piece looked at the trust problem underneath that, the sense that nobody believes the rules will hold. This piece points to something both of those circled without quite naming: while the country argues about foreigners, the property story that will actually shape Thailand's future is unfolding among its own people.

Underneath the more visible fight between foreign ownership and enforcement is a more consequential set of issues. A generation of Thai families who want to own homes. A supply gap exactly where affordable homes should be. A lending market that keeps saying no to people who might otherwise qualify. And a pool of foreign capital that could, with better design, help fund part of the fix.

So the question worth ending on is simple. What is Thailand doing to build the homes its own families want, and to lend them the money to buy them? What is it doing for the office worker who earns well, plays by the rules, and still watches the door close? That question has little to do with any foreigner, and it may be the one that actually decides what kind of country Thailand becomes.

Originally published on The Thaiger - Part 3 of 8.

*Analysis, not legal or financial advice. Figures on house-price-to-income ratio, mortgage approval rates, household debt, and buyer sentiment are drawn from publicly reported 2024-2026 data from the Bank of Thailand, the Bank for International Settlements, REIC, Numbeo, and major Thai research centres and surveys, and are summarised for clarity.

Thank you, perfect analysis 👍

The same now applies to the average worker in America, young people are not buying homes because they simply can't afford them. The only people that own homes these days are either the very wealthy or people who bought them a long time ago.

58 minutes ago, spidermike007 said:

The same now applies to the average worker in America, young people are not buying homes because they simply can't afford them. The only people that own homes these days are either the very wealthy or people who bought them a long time ago.

Australia the same.

It's what happens when governments allow housing, which should simply be accommodation, to become an investment vehicle to build wealth.

Eventually, renters become destined to remain renters, because the one's with money, the investors, squeeze the renters out of the property market.

13 hours ago, KhunHeineken said:

Australia the same.

It's what happens when governments allow housing, which should simply be accommodation, to become an investment vehicle to build wealth.

Eventually, renters become destined to remain renters, because the one's with money, the investors, squeeze the renters out of the property market.

One of the greatest mistakes they made in America was to allow hedge funds and similar vehicles to purchase thousands of residential homes as part of their portfolios. Anybody with half a brain in their head would have realized this was just a very bad idea.

6 minutes ago, spidermike007 said:

One of the greatest mistakes they made in America was to allow hedge funds and similar vehicles to purchase thousands of residential homes as part of their portfolios. Anybody with half a brain in their head would have realized this was just a very bad idea.

What percentage of homes are owned by hedge funds?

20 minutes ago, spidermike007 said:

One of the greatest mistakes they made in America was to allow hedge funds and similar vehicles to purchase thousands of residential homes as part of their portfolios. Anybody with half a brain in their head would have realized this was just a very bad idea.

Funny that. Your anti-hero wants to make a change.

Even on your favorite outlet :

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/trump-housing-affordability.html

President Donald Trump said the U.S. should bar large institutional investors from buying single-family homes,

arguing that corporate ownership has helped push housing further out of reach for everyday Americans.

29 minutes ago, FlorC said:

Funny that. Your anti-hero wants to make a change.

Even on your favorite outlet :

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/trump-housing-affordability.html

President Donald Trump said the U.S. should bar large institutional investors from buying single-family homes,

arguing that corporate ownership has helped push housing further out of reach for everyday Americans.

A bit late isn't it?

Just imagine how affordable houses would be if they allowed unfettered foreign ownership. Prices would be absolutely through the roof with 4 billion potential buyers on your doorstep.

46 minutes ago, Mr Awesome said:

What percentage of homes are owned by hedge funds?

Enough to contribute to the massive inflation of the housing market has seen in the last decade or so. It's all about supply and demand and when you remove tens of thousands of houses from the market it does have a trickle down effect.

3 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

A bit late isn't it?

Did your side mention doing something like this during 8 + 4 years ?

1 hour ago, FlorC said:

Did your side mention doing something like this during 8 + 4 years ?

The thing that I'm willing to admit that you are not prepared to admit, is that both sides are corrupt to the core, and neither side has a capable or decent leader at this point

11 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Enough to contribute to the massive inflation of the housing market has seen in the last decade or so. It's all about supply and demand and when you remove tens of thousands of houses from the market it does have a trickle down effect.

Hedge funds are a minor contribution to the housing issue.

The largests factors behind rising home prices are:

1. Housing supply not keeping up with demand. In many countries (including the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Australia), home construction has lagged population growth and household formation for years.

2. Low interest rates (especially from 2009–2022), which increased buyers’ purchasing power.

3. Population growth and migration into desirable cities.

4. Zoning and land-use restrictions, which limit new construction.

5. Higher construction costs (labor, materials, and regulations).

12 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

One of the greatest mistakes they made in America was to allow hedge funds and similar vehicles to purchase thousands of residential homes as part of their portfolios. Anybody with half a brain in their head would have realized this was just a very bad idea.

You would be referring mainly to Blackstone.

The numbers are very concerning.

https://www.multifamilydive.com/news/one-tenth-us-apartments-owned-by-private-equity/749332/

"Blackstone’s holdings make up over 10% of the 2.2 million total units, according to a recent report."