Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages, and variable rates are not criminal.
People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.
> Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages
At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage.
> People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing.
They 100% play a significant role on the problem.
> Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing.
Not in any way that fundamentally changes the status quo, certainly not to reverse it, and also housing has been in a downspiral of accesibility for 70 years, 3 local laws in Canada is not gonna fix it.
> just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay
Housing is a need, overpaying or homelessness is a real junction for a sizeble part of the population.
Look at singapore, they are more capitalist than the US and has banned private landlords. Their results speak for themselves, cheaper mortgages, more space per person, shorter commutes, possibilities for larger families to find enough space.
If you prefer to have a building "for billionaries" empty like New York does instead of close to 0% homelessness then thats your choice, but do not pretend it is to help hard working people be rewarded for their labour. Landlords are a remenant of aristocracy, a way for rich tophs to keep living large from their estate. Adam Smith called them parasites for a reason, they are a negative GDP engine.
> At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage.
Ok, you just don't understand how mortgages work in the US.
Fixed-rate mortgages, which represent 91% of the mortgage market, can be had for terms of 15 or 30 years.
This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. You can, right now, lock in a rate for the next 30 years in the US.
> This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years.
This isn't strictly true - 2 years tends to be the shortest (with the lowest rates) you can get, but longer terms are very common.
In the UK, 2/3/5/10 year fixed rates are common. Many people used to go with 2 year fixed rate (for the lowest interest rates), then at the end of the term, switch to another fixed rate for the next N years. Now people are opting for 5/10 year fixed rate a lot more than they used to, especially if they can lock in to a low interest rate deal.
In France you can get a fixed rate mortgage for the entire term of the mortgage. In Germany, I've seen fixed rate mortgages for 10/20/30 years advertised.
Those are the only countries I'm familiar with though, not sure how other European countries differ.
We got 1.6% locked in for 15 years (and fully amortized!) in Germany, when we were lucky enough to finally beat out the wannabe landlords on our fourth offer, and then only because the seller had strong enough neighborhood ties that she didn't want to present her longtime friends and neighbors with a string of random renters, so she and her son were willing to wait a few days for our financing.
We also had the good fortune to have done this in 2015, when you could still occasionally find a rowhouse in a close-in suburb near transit for a non-insane amount of money.
People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.