How Congress' new housing bill affects Washington

A big piece of legislation regarding housing went into effect this week. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act was passed by Congress and it's a bipartisan effort considered a major step in addressing affordability and supply especially for first-time homebuyers. So here are the main takeaways. The act restricts huge investors that buy up large swath of homes. It speeds up permitting for builders. It exempts local environmental reviews for ADUs or those small homes built on land on an existing property. To get more insight on the local impact here we spoke with Steven Ku with the McConnell Group. And it really aims to solve the housing crisis in this country through increasing the supply of homes, decreasing the red tape for development and ensuring that homes stay in the hands of working Americans not megacorporations. For Seattle specifically the housing act will continue to make it easier for middle housing so think ADUs, townhomes, duplexes to be easier to be more easily and cheaper developed in the city. And when you say you know keeping single-family homes to regular people and keeping it away from maybe investor institutions, is that a really big deal? Are there a lot of institution corporations that own a bunch of units and homes in our area? Yeah that's a great question. So currently corporations only own a fraction of single-family homes that exist in the country and the law does not actually require corporations to sell the homes that they currently own. It just caps future buying of homes. So corporations cannot purchase more than 350 homes moving forward. So if they only own a small fraction is it really going to help lower prices here of homes? Because isn't that the goal is to lower home prices and make it more affordable for people? The short answer is not in the immediate future. And so yes I think here in Seattle specifically yes there are institutional investors and we know that our market is primarily driven by a high-paying tech workforce competing for a limited pool of homes. And so specifically for us here in Seattle we won't see something change overnight but in the long run there will be less institutional investors to compete with. What do you think regarding the ADU and like you said it'll be easier it kind of cuts the environmental red tape and other red tape to build maybe a second home on a property that you already own. Is that a big enough deal here? Is that going to make a big deal? Because I know in Seattle they've tried to incentivize that for years now. I think it is going to be a big deal anytime that you can speed up the permitting process, that you can speed up the review process, anytime that you can minimize the cost to build middle housing. I think that matters greatly when we talk about addressing this clear need that we have in the city. Well even before the road to housing act cities like Seattle as I mentioned they've really been pushing ADUs for years right. They've been trying to motivate homeowners to build more units on their property that they already own hoping to create more supply. Still the McConnell group believes that the new federal law that just went into effect will make a bigger difference in this real estate arena by speeding things up more efficiently, cutting even more red tape, allowing more units to go up at an affordable price point.