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investing in the housing market does not make you morally corrupt. you may disagree with the tactics but if its not him it will be someone else and its also not illegal and its not immoral.
Participating in, profiting from, and advancing a system of housing distribution that puts people on the streets as housing sits vacant doesn't seem moral in a conventional sense, but do you plair
who says the houses are sitting empty
no one said they do, but that's how it works around the world. it makes more money to let them sit empty and wait a bit to find rich fucks that pay a few times more than the old tenant profile could. even better when they are the really stupid kind that can't handle their money all that well and agrees to build the place up anew at their own cost. estate agency can oversell a run down property on the grounds that since the poor people are gone now, and there is no space anywhere else, the place is actually worth a lot now, especially considering that future neighbors will be similarly affluent.
if you would rent it out right away or had to by law, you might have to take someone poorer than you wanted and settle for a lower rent, since you can't just wait to sell or rent on your terms. letting estates sit empty also obviously bumps up value, since taking habitable space out of the equation at all makes every other place more valuable, since there is less total space.
it's the same as if you buy a limited sneaker release and let it sit in the box for years until you find some dumbass that pays your ridiculous price. other, cheaper people would have wanted it, but not for your price. in that sense, letting a place sit empty is actually a form of future investment. the estate agent wants to get rid of the place for as high a price as possible, since this will set the mark and future sales in the same neighborhood will take this as a reference. from than on, it doesn't matter how fucked up the place is, it's about the potential to make it more valuable. in that case, estate value isn't determined by the places status. it's about the projected worth of it once it's made nice again and once the neighborhood has a new population of a higher income tier than the one before.
shit is more complex than a game of monopoly where you buy buy buy and build and build. let people fight over the land and outbid each other, wait for your white whale, and maybe you will get back what you haven't made in the time the land sat empty in a very short amount of time, and a lot more total in the same time than you would have made before once you got the ball rolling. at the point when you are done exploiting the area, there's probably another former ghetto or low income district waiting to be exploited in the same way.