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US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

reuters.com

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Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#491

Post by Horffupolde »

WalterBright wrote: post #325
observationist wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing. The things that they do have mass…

> They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing. Raising prices when you only have a tiny portion of the market does not work. People won't buy them when there's…

The theater on fire has a small exit door.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#492

Post by themafia »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #48

The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…

> was already starting to cool down.

You seem to want it both ways. It was a misconception, but it apparently did happen, and apparently "cooled down?" I don't think all these things can be true.

It's highly possible they were heavily investing and were planning on continuing but people noticing and the social pushback it created caused them to change their minds about the strategy.

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.

People may or may not be. They may or may not be my neighbors. You seem to be pushing a set of ideals rather than a set of facts.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#493

Post by nospice »

enraged_camel wrote: post #248
nospice wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Corporations" is meaningless in this context. If you want to own a rental home in the US, you should set up an LLC, both for liability reasons and because it makes it easier to deal with taxes and expenses. In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy /…

LLC may be a type of corporation but when people complain about corporations buying up homes they really mean C-corps, not LLCs owned by Uncle Bob who likes to flip houses.

Right, and when people share stats such as "60% of homes are owned by corporations", they're either clueless or are trying to deliberately muddy the waters.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#494

Post by subpixel »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #48

The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are

To a degree, but there's a whole tranche of investment vehicles that accredited investors use to invest in single-family homes that is not securitized at all, and not on Wall Street. The whole fix-and-flip industry feeds into this now, loaning out money to turn houses into rentals that some LLC holds.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#495

Post by anonymars »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #328
tbrownaw wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it can be an investment even with no capital gains, there's still income from charging rent.

Which still contributes to unaffordability. A house bought for the purpose of renting out is a house that could have gone to someone who wanted to buy it. It creates upward pressure on housing prices. I mean, I get it. There are some people that truly do want to rent a house because they know the living situation is temporary. But we have a generation that was able to buy houses during an economic boom where you coul…

If what this article describes really does come to pass, it may still help.

Often, mom-and-pop landlords are happy to be making more than the mortgage rather than MBAs trying to extract every possible marginal cent. It's less of a faceless spreadsheet relationship.

I guess time will tell if it's anything more than blowing smoke.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#496

Post by mandevil »

chucksta wrote: post #241
mandevil wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that Big Money Private Equity or "took a class from that Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who said we should create a company and invest in real estate" corporation?

The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes" Home many rich dads do you know with 12,500 homes?

It is possible that the article has changed, but that is not in the article that I see right now, which is this: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-will-ban-large-instituti...

Looking at Google, I see this press release for a 2024 study says that "3 companies own nearly 19,000 metro Atlanta homes" across 190 LLC shell companies: https://news.gsu.edu/2024/02/26/researchers-find-three-compa... (1). But even so, that 19,000 represented 11% of the single-family rental market in the Atlanta metro area, meaning that even if it's 38,000 then we're talking 1 in 5 of the rental homes available in Atlanta, which the article says has many more large investor owned homes than anywhere else in the US- an expert is quoted as saying that it has more than the next 2-3 cities combined for large investors. If that 38,000 is correct (and I only have your quote for that number) then more than 10% of all large investor-owned homes across the country are in the Atlanta metro area, since the Reuters article that this gives large investors (more than 1k homes) a total of 345k rental single-family homes across the US as of 2Q 2025. A 2022 GAO study found that institutional investors owned about 3% of all rental single-family homes across the US.

"Rich Dad" style investors simply own the vast majority of rental single-family homes across the US. According to the bar chart in the Reuters article, investors who own 1-5 single family houses available for rent (the classic dentist who went to a "Make Money in Real Estate" seminar) own 87% of the national market. Looking at the GSU press release, they claim Atlanta is an unusually attractive market for large investors- they particularly call out the lack of tenant protections- and that means that it has concentrated the activity, and it is still not particularly large a part of the market. Enough to dominate some neighborhoods of Atlanta, probably. But the solution is not some nationwide ban by executive order that can't possibly be constitutional, but for Georgia to get better tenant protections so that institutional investors aren't as attracted to the market.

1: I'm going to presume that the 38,000 is from later work finding more shell companies. I also can't read the underlying research article because I am unwilling to pay absurd journal fees.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#497

Post by Forgeties79 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #174
JoshTriplett wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rich people What part of "people at risk of doxing" made you jump to "rich people" rather than, for instance, "people in groups commonly attacked"? > force them to act with consideration of the community By doing what, precisely? "Have you tried not being (commonly attacked group here)?"

Only rich people can afford houses in the US, ergo.

~65% of the US is rich?

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#498

Post by jcranberry »

Noaidi wrote: post #218
roadside_picnic wrote: post #48

The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…

If "Black rock isn't buying up all the housing" then how do you explain why Blackrock lost $17 billion in capital today? https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/200899449445747946... It matters, you just dont want to know it matters.

The tweet says blackstone. Thats a separate firm from blackrock. And the tweets misleading in the first place, it's looking at the bottom of a candle which wasn't even the current price at the time of the photograph? And the stock closed at about 154.

Besides all this says is that it matters for blackstone...not for the housing market at large.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#499

Post by mapontosevenths »

Plasmoid wrote: post #457
tshaddox wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is basically a maximum wage for landlords Well sure, but it's good to incentivize looking for sources of wages other than (literally) rent-seeking.

Renting out property isn't rent seeking.

Ok. I'll bite. Why is the thing thats literallly the basis for the term rent seeking not rent seeking?

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#500

Post by ZeWaka »

austhrow743 wrote: post #469
rgmerk wrote: post #165

It will make very little difference in the end. Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities. If you want housing to be…

>It will make very little difference in the end. It will make very little difference if Wall Street investors hold very little property. Putting a finger on the scale of how much real estate is individually owned definitely makes a difference though. It makes it worse. 100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties. >If you want housing to be…

> 100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties.

Is that really true in the US?

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