It was not clear that it was your point at all! Yes of course, gotta get your return on capital invested or the money goes elsewhere, probably into a REIT that invests in the existing assets and drives up prices even further. Because the demand for housing goes somewhere: either existing owners profit or the people building and alleviating the shortage profit.

Every single municipality in the US I'm familiar with has done everything they can to make it expensive to build and try to remove any profit margin from building. Which leads to capital moving towards piggybacking on the rentierism of the average homeowner, the people who control the policies that make it unaffordable to build.

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estearum 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How do you interpret "which compresses already-near-zero margin on real estate development" if not "the costs are already near the sale price?"

	▲	smcin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not all new houses sell. Some become shadow inventory, some take 5+ years to sell. If you drive around new developments you can measure the fraction. IIRC, Mountain House (near Tracy, CA) in the 2008-2010 crash was an example of a large new development that did not initially sell and was in serious danger of going zombie, and not having the new schools that had been promised to people moving in.