This was a crazy story I read today of a man who was apparently making money by constantly purchasing homes with the intent to flip them to make more money. However, in this case he apparently did this with 14 homes while failing to pay taxes on the profits he made. Therefore, for the four years of doing this he was fined two million dollars. I know a lot of real estate agents actually do this where they live in a place temporarily with the sole intent of selling it. With this example it makes more sense for many to do this than working at a job.
With that said, apparently there is going to b an introduction of a tax for these types of people. From what I read, if people sell a home within one year they will be taxed twenty percent on all profits from the sold property. That goes down to eighteen percent at eighteen months and after two years there would be no tax. So the person above won’t be happy with this I would imagine. The one argument I read is that this can cause less real estate to be available as people would delay their listings to avoid the tax. Then again, there is the point how homes should be purchased primarily to actually live in versus like some kind of stock investment.
I am inclined to say if housing is an issue then overall it probably makes sense to try and stop people in doing stuff like this. In many ways it would be no different than someone buying all the food supply and then reselling it for extreme amounts of profit.