Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 27th of November 2017 to The Sounding Line.

Sam Zell, billionaire businessman and real-estate mogul, recently sat down with Bloomberg for a wide ranging interview about the potential impacts of the ongoing effort to reform the US tax code.

On regulatory reform:

“There is no question that our country needs growth. The most important thing to make growth happen is reduction in regulation. I mean, you want to talk about growth, my compliance costs have gone up 500% in the last eight years. That’s non-productive cost and I am just a small player compared to compliance costs of many of these corporations. So I think the goal is, we want to create an environment where people are encouraged to take risk and if they take risk, they get paid for taking the risk… I am most in favor of reduction in corporate taxes because I think that has the biggest impact on world-wide competitiveness.”

On mortgage tax deductibility:

“I think that there is an awful lot of focus on this issue, national home builders and realtors are screaming. I think this is a pig in a poke. I think, number one, the very wealth, the top 1% that everyone wants to punish, doesn’t have very many mortgages and therefore the deduction is not terribly relevant. The middle guy who’s making a reasonable amount of money, $500,000 mortgage on a $700,000 $800,000 house is manageable and not a big deal. I think the place where this has the most impact is mcmansions where they hustled a lot of people to buy over priced houses with overpriced mortgages… I have a hard time believing that you’re going to give up buying a million dollar house with all the accruements of a million dollar house (TC: to rent)… Canada eliminated mortgage deductions about 20 years ago. Everybody predicated it was the end of the world. All of the realtors screamed and yelled and you know what happened? Nothing.”

On the real-estate market:

“Right now we are building 387,000 new multi-family units in this country. I think that’s the largest number since 1971. So, that means a lot of people are employed, a lot of things are being bought, a lot of activity is happening. So I don’t think oversupply, which reduces the demand or reduces the attractiveness is necessarily bad for the economy, it’s just bad for real-estate owners.”

There is much more, so enjoy it below:

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