Suggestions
Ben Bear
Co-founder, CEO @ BuildCasa. On a mission to build 100,000 homes 🏡🏠🏡
Ben Bear holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) in History and Communication Studies from Northwestern University. His professional journey includes various significant roles in different organizations. Ben co-founded and served as the CEO of BuildCasa, acted as an Angel Investor/Advisor in numerous startups, and held several executive positions at Spin, including CEO, Chief Business Officer, VP Business, Head of BD, Partnerships, & Policy, and Head of BD & Partnerships. Prior to his engagements at Spin, he was the Co-Founder and CEO of workgeni.us. Furthermore, Ben Bear has experience as the Vice President of Global Sales, Head of Sales/Business Development, and Director of Business Development at Vungle. His career also extends to being the General Manager of Ivy Insiders at Revolution Prep and a Regional Manager at Ivy Insiders.
Highlights
Policy idea to increase housing supply: the IRS should treat development profit made from selling homes to individual homeowners as long term capital gains vs. ordinary income. With this tweak, hundreds of thousands of new homes would be built bringing the American dream back into reach for many.
Why does this matter? The current tax code favors building rental units over homeownership opportunities. To use a specific example, a real estate development fund that makes $10M profit from selling units to homeowners would pay $4.2M in taxes compared to $2.5M if they sold a rental building to investors.
As a result, for sale projects need to have dramatically higher returns to attract investors. Layer on high interest rates, restrictive zoning, and punitive construction defect liability rules and you have a perfect storm leading to very little new supply being built for owner occupants by anyone other than the Fortune 500 homebuilders.
As a first mover, BuildCasa comes across examples of crazy underutilization. Here we'll turn 2.15 acres of unused backyard space into 24 new homes just a few miles from downtown Sacramento. After subdivision, the two neighboring homeowners will receive $375K each in cash while keeping their house and mortgage. We'll create 12 new lots and use SB9 to permit to 2 units per lot. The end result will be two dozen new starter homes in a neighborhood that hasn't seen any new construction since 1993.
