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It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

Henry George was right about land values. And today we have a homebuilder cartel rooted in control of land and financing.

To understand what is going on, the low output of housing production in the face of high demand, let’s start with a slide in the most recent investor presentation from the number one homebuilder in America, D.R. So, what we're actually seeing more from the smaller builders who are facing some capital crunch is land deals that they have tied up, they've processed approvals on, they thought about building homes on, they're having a hard time finding the regional banks to finance them. I don’t know, but it seems kind of crazy that large homebuilders would be doing joint ventures with each other on land acquisition, when that could very easily lead to holding supply off the market and preventing smaller developers from competing to build cheaper homes.

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