Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

That reporter had a lot of fun with that headline

I can't read the original article, but this appears to be an identical article at least from the start: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2021/11/02/zillow-to-sell-7000-... I don't know which is the original and which is the copy. Edit: It seems like they are both sites owned by the same company? But one has a more aggressive paywall? I don't know.

The schadenfreude is real for me seeing this. A company like Zillow getting into flipping seems questionable to me. The customers are no longer aligned with the company on goals with something like this. It's like when the realtor offers to buy your house... they obviously feel like they can make more than you, when they're supposed to represent you!

Edit 2: What I'm surprised at as well is how short-term their forecasting seemed to be. They just started doing this and the market cooled a tiny bit (also, what? where?) and they're selling everything off? Were they incapable of sustaining anything but massive constant growth?

Turns out that mass flipping houses doesn’t work when you can’t hire contractors to do the work for a price that makes your budget assumptions hold.

I am disappointed that they’re looking to offload them to institutional investors rather than individuals. Housing should probably not be an investment vehicle, but here we are.

There is plenty of idle money in the investment world that needs places to go, unfortunately. Homebuyers are still being priced out by institutional investors looking to be long-term landlords. The market consensus right now is that inflation is here to stay for the next decade and bond prices aren’t adjusting accordingly, so there’s a flood of cash into all asset classes to try to hedge.

They are not the problem with residential real estate prices. The real problem is people that prevent additional housing from being built.