Landlords do have to pay an income tax on property regardless of whether it is occupied or not, it is just that when a property is not being rented, it generates 0 income and 30% of $0 is $0.
Do you mean some sort of land appreciation tax?
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Don't forget about real estate taxes in lieu of an income tax when empty. They are due whether a place is rented or not.
Income tax can only tax income.
As others have said - land value / property tax is supposed to take care of this. You could also add a specific vacancy tax.
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Income tax on no income sounds fucking stupid. Just up property tax on the 3th or 4th house or apartment by a fuckton, watch everyone panic sell their shit crashing the housing market into oblivion and call it a day. Ez affordable housing.
Denmark applies a property tax to foreign properties at ones disposal. If it's rented, it's waived and tax is levied on the rental income. If it's unoccupied, it's considered a luxury available for your use and thus is taxable property, even though it's in a foreign jurisdiction.
Multiple holder companies incoming. Now that will need to be plugged up.
Not saying this is a bad idea. But they will find loopholes.
- Require rental properties to be registered and report when vacant.
- Block any new single dwelling rental property purchases.
- Only allow more rental property purchases when vacancy rate is below a certain threshold in a metropolitan area.
Yeah, there was just recently a big scandal in my city where one guy bought 20 houses with 9 shell companies. Attempted to do shitty flipping jobs. Selling the houses from one company to the next so they didn't immediately jump up in price in the real estate history.
The sad part is: if he hadn't overpriced the market and sold more of them he would've gotten away with it, but he waited too long and got stuck. But until that point nobody knew one guy had 20 houses, it was 2 per company on paper.
Every single one of all the government measures I've seen to "help people" in the current "tight housing market" is designed to prop-up housing prices and rents, never ever anything which would lower rents or house prices.
In my country they even given money to renters rather than, say, impose rent controls or start large projects building public housing and do this all the while claiming there's not enough money for things like Education.
From my own experience working in Finance every single government measure I've seen on this since a decade ago sure looks a lot like using the power of the State for manipulating the housing market to push prices up.
Not to be a downer, but how does this fit into personalfinance? Like at all?... I mean, I agree with the point but this belongs in politics or something.
Yeah, this post should be removed.
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Landlords should pay 100% tax on their empty rentals.
You'll see how fast they will accept any and all new tenants, at a much lower price.
Which would also flood the market with housing, lowering the prices even more until renting becomes an actual beneficial option compared to buying and paying off a loan.
Real estate would also not be seen as an investment anymore.
In this case landlords could just pay some money to fake tenants to make their rentals appear occupied (at a ridiculously low price). Rental prices could even rise because of free rentals number reduction and necessity to cover additional expenses.
Real estate should be considered an investment. It's one of the few things people invest in that is actually valuable. It's the speculative and labrynthine financial markets that are the problem in that regard.
The only reason mega-renters like Blackrock and Vanguard are able to monolithically buy property in the first place is because of dubious speculative earnings and government bailouts.
It's not surprising that home ownership was actually a lot higher 60 years ago.
People require to land to live on, it is a basic necessity, and basic necessities absolutely should not be considered an investment.
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Real estate should be considered an investment.
Housing can be affordable, or it can be an investment. Not both.
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This article title makes ZERO sense. Empty house tax, sure.
But an "income" tax on no rent being paid?
Why would that EVER be passed by the people who own all of the houses? Don't waste the poors' time lol
Yep, a 100% income tax rate on zero income is zero. It seems a lot of reddit's financial incompetence is spilling over to lemmy. Also, property taxes exist and are being paid already...
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Fyi, what you want to say is that we should have a wealth tax. I agree with you on that. We should also tax stock holdings similarly.
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The amount of vacant units in cities where people actually want to live tends to be highly exaggerated (Manhattan is generally sitting somewhere around a 5% vacancy rate), but twisting income tax into some weird kind of tax on unrealized value is administratively messy and completely unnecessary when we already have much simpler solutions in the forms of land value taxes or even basic property taxes. Not to mention, increasing taxes on rental units just increases everyone's rent, which is a rather odd strategy if the aim is to make housing more affordable.
People really will propose literally anything except the wild concept of building more housing.
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I don't know about this, but the non occupant owners should have to pay obscene property taxes and then reduce the rates for owner-occupants to a reasonable level.
If buying a house isn't right for you - and for many renting should be the better option - then you will be forced to pay a lot more so the landlord can recover not only the cost of the building, but also that much higher taxes. In effect you are pushing people who really shouldn't buy a house to buy one anyway.
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So a less efficient and more complicated land tax? Is there any benefit to this compared to just taxing based on the value?
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That's what property tax is for.
Raise the property tax, exemption for owner occupied, then tax the rest.
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What are the unintended consequences of this proposal? It is amazing how many people replying to this topic have proposed something without considering what effect it will have. Sure there is a problem, but most solutions have serious negative downsides.
I don't think people care about the downsides for landlords anymore. Real or imagined, perceived greed is what people blame for high rent costs. They're ready to make greedy landlords suffer as they have and I can't say I blame them one bit.
The fundamental misunderstanding in this view, IMO, is that greed is not something that landowners are uniquely equipped with. Rice is cheap as hell; are rice producers simply not greedy, and that's why rice is cheap? No, it's because an absolutely massive amount of rice is produced every day, and there's more than enough around to ensure anyone who wants rice can get it. Slightly more abstractly, there is more than enough supply to meet the demand. And like housing, cheap food is an absolute need. But unlike food, housing has been woefully underproduced for decades now in cities, and government policy has done a lot to cause that. It's illegal to build denser than single-family homes in most urban land, and the aim of policy has been more to protect people's investments rather than have housing be affordable - two goals that are fundamentally at odds with each other.
This isn't a coincidence, of course. A lot of federal housing policy goes back to the 50s and 60s, when you had suburbs that literally banned people of color from living in them. Housing policy was explicitly designed to advantage landowners and penalize renters, which is to say, wealthier white families pursuing The American Dream™ and urban Black families whose neighborhoods were systematically redlined and demolished to build highways for white suburbanites.
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What downsides? You come out talking about unintended consequences but give no examples.
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In Denmark most apartments have “residence requirement” - if you own a unit and keep it empty the city will fill it with someone waiting for public housing.
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landlords ought not exist
Ahem.
Landlords should have their rental properties seized and placed under the ownership of the local government. Berlin did it. You want to bring housing prices back into reach of the middle class? Stop letting people hoard houses.
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They don’t? They do where I live. Property tax is real in Michigan.
Although I love the gothamiat. I think they should pay taxes. But what does this have to do with personal finance?
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