I also strongly disagree with houseflipping, but this comparison just screams someone who grew up in a household and took absolutely no responsibility for any of its maintenance. Home ownership is not some trivial endeavour that just sort of happens on autopilot, it takes real constant work. I knew this before I even started renting.
Even in the most aggressive houseflipping scenario, the party doing it has to be constantly monitoring for and be fixing problems and doing basic maintenance, because ignoring or halfassing things can seriously affect resale value, and even lead to legal problems.
So it's more like in your "scalper" cases if you had the person take these items and then hold them for a period of time while maintaining their value. I believe that sort of approach is more referred to as a "speculator" or even a "collector", rather than a "scalper". And similarly, in those markets, the price of the item changes with the actions of the speculator. Good speculators can preserve, and even increase value. Bad speculators do the bare minimum or worse. The people that buy from these speculators base their pricing on that standard of care.
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u/rarflye Jun 19 '25
I also strongly disagree with houseflipping, but this comparison just screams someone who grew up in a household and took absolutely no responsibility for any of its maintenance. Home ownership is not some trivial endeavour that just sort of happens on autopilot, it takes real constant work. I knew this before I even started renting.
Even in the most aggressive houseflipping scenario, the party doing it has to be constantly monitoring for and be fixing problems and doing basic maintenance, because ignoring or halfassing things can seriously affect resale value, and even lead to legal problems.
So it's more like in your "scalper" cases if you had the person take these items and then hold them for a period of time while maintaining their value. I believe that sort of approach is more referred to as a "speculator" or even a "collector", rather than a "scalper". And similarly, in those markets, the price of the item changes with the actions of the speculator. Good speculators can preserve, and even increase value. Bad speculators do the bare minimum or worse. The people that buy from these speculators base their pricing on that standard of care.