Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates.
In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue.
"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China. In the US, we don't see that.
Property taxes in the US mean you can't speculate so easily on property (you lose ~1% value a year). But they have 99 year leases instead, but everyone thinks the government will let you renew those with minimal fees.
China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else. It was not market forces.
How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration?
In the US, builders don't build 100 starter homes because it is more profitable and easier to build a couple McMansions and sell them for crazy prices. THOSE are the homes that get built as "investments". No builder will benefit from producing a large supply of homes, so they don't. The market will not self correct.
Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now.
There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits.
A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.
Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.
Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.
In the US, the largest amount of government land is held by the Feds and they keep increasing the limits on what the land can be used for year after year. Figure out how to make new home building key to government finances like in China and you will INSTANTLY have the problem solved and even have over supply.
Some say there's little demand but that's horse shit. People snap up much worse desolate land around me to homestead for mucho dinero. Building a house with your own hands on public or unowned desolate lands is the most essential of basic human fulfilments. The youth cannot afford the already built homes nor their construction, so they ought to be able to take matters in their own hands.
To build a starter home I not only had to go to bumfuck Egypt with the most libertarian zoning anywhere near jobs I can find, i also had to rule out the 9/10 of properties with practically irrevocable covenants made by self righteous boomers back in the 80s who already built their pig farm shithole and don't want their precious livestock living near anything but a mansion.
Then I had to find a rare loophole around code compliance and inspections so I could DIY it on weekends and not be subject to weekday inspections. Most codes want stuff like an expensive egress window even though no one living in the house is bigger than a much smaller sliding window, and it goes on infinitum.
Then I had to find a place they hadn't outlawed water yet through a grandfathered well, and finally get buddy enough with the power company to actually get them to run power without royally fucking me with arbitrary requirements. Almost the entire system is designed around grandfathered protectionism while kicking the next generation in the teeth with entirely different and constrained rules voted on by people who who live in places that don't even conform to the requirements imposed on you, which of course gives them a free artificial value boost as well.
For example in some countries, many students share a house. Whereas in other countries, every student will have a whole house to themselves.
In some places, children will get their own house at 16. In others, children, parents, and grandparents are all sharing one house.
The people who actually take care of a community aren't "entitled" for wanting to be part of it.
That's homeowner vacancy rate. Rental vacancy rate is around 6.9%:
This is because a ton of them are in the Chinese equivalent of like Boise, Idaho where demand is fairly low. People want to live where the high paying jobs are.
Better example: northern Alaska.
They tried this in China. People would just get divorced so each partner had their own home. It turns out you can easily find someone in your family to "buy" a house as well.
Its the same thing as taxes. No one is stopping you from making up fake receipts. But you don't do that because its fraud.
Additionally, since 2004, there’s a law that allows local authorities to take over empty homes and sell them, to make sure they are used for housing
Not sure what the effects have been of either
One thing missing - renters cannot homestead their apartment and so the funds that own the apartment have to charge more rent to cover taxes on those apartments.
And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.
In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...)
In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second...)
4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)
I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)
We already have speculation tax in Canada.
As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other.
And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.