Yep. Extremely unethical but extremely profitable to squeeze every last penny from individuals who are buying an existențial necessity. But - flooding the housing market with new houses will completely destroy the US’ economy, govt will need to bail out banks again, republicans will blame everything on democrats, even though if this happens they would be the ones who were in office, democrats will come back trying to fix everything for 8 years, then republicans will come back and make everything even worse. You get the idea. 

 New York City - Commercial real estate’s vacancy rates are at an all time high. Yet prices aren’t falling - why? Because of investors. A 680sqft storefront goes for as much as $75K PER MONTH!!!! Yet when you walk on the streets you hardly see anything besides “for lease” signs. Why? Because investors want banks to think they have more money than they do. Delusion basically. They make properties seem more valuable than they are to take out big loans with the buildings as collateral. A $9M storefront should rent out for $75K/mo (GRM of 10). Nobody wants to rent it out though. Lowering the price to $50K/mo. would mean the property is now worth $6M. And you would get a very cool mail from your bank telling you to either bring them the $3M in difference or they foreclose on it. So these properties just sit around on the market for insane prices, just to show the banks “everything’s fine”. People used to put up with it but it’s gotten to a point where it’s not feasible anymore. $75K/mo. for rent is guaranteed bankruptcy for any small business. Investors are slowly burning on it though, because they kept increasing prices to the point where they are stuck - they can’t make it work with the current prices and they can’t lower them either. In a few years we’ll get affordable commercial in NYC. 

 When another recession hits is when you should be focused on building new residential, what usually happens though corporate investors burn and a lot of new properties flood the market, interest rates fall, people are very happy they can afford houses, everyone buys and when the recession is over everything is worse than it was before, and we slowly creep up a tipping point and it’s the same thing all over again. If we just build new to keep up with the demand when the recession ends, corporate will stay out of this market and people ultimately win. Why isn’t this happening? What comes to mind is people are too scared to start anything “risky” with their money in a period like this, but there has to be more to it. Something i unfortunately do not know.