I was talking with a real estate agent in SF and he said it’s not unusual for landlords looking to sell their rent controlled building to just let units sit empty.
Why? Because it can increase the value of the building by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Losing out on $24k worth of rent each year is easy if you know it comes with an extra $300k in your pocket when you sell.
The estimate is there are 100,000 empty homes in the SF area.[1]
I’ve seen an estimate of 20,000 for SF proper.
This [2] report to SF Planning states the number of empty units has doubled over time.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-100-0... [2]http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/CR_Final_2.3.19.pdf
Even if that was added to the vacancy rate, that would still leave SF with around the national average (~7%) vacancy rate, and that's without counting the off-the-market housing anywhere else in the average (and not double counting actual on-the-market vacancies everywhere else, either.) Anyway you cut it, SF has a low vacancy rate/rate of empty homes.
This may or may not be true, but that is the idea.
But I don't think it's fair to say that expensive housing, full stop, is a product of regulation.
There are desirably places to live that have housing that goes up at a good enough rate to be considered an investment. As long as there are people of sufficient means, some of them will add property to their portfolio of assets. A home that sits unused on prime real estate is, frankly, more of a drain on that community than $100,000 in cash sitting under a mattress going unused.
It's not perfect, and it IS a regulation, but penalizing people for hoovering up housing stock and then not using it, can benefit society.
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
The real problem is we're not taxing these properties at the true value they could provide to society, so a massive market inefficiency exists.
If you're putting the place up on AirBnB more often than not, the unit is not your primary residence and shouldn't be afforded benefits as such. If the goal of a vacancy tax is to increase rental supply, AirBnB does pretty much the opposite.
In California, and most of the US, property assessments are done by elected officials on an annual basis. In California the rate of increase is severely capped, but you're free to apply for a reduction if the value of your property decreases. If you're legitimately on vacation (or whatever), apply for an exemption. It's not that complex.
Also, if you take your reasoning to the extreme then an empty apartment building has a negative value.
It also opens it up to people who want to buy the building and move in.
