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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 b

• xp84 9mo ago
  That sounds right. And, I have to admit, it's pretty good politics to ban a mostly imaginary thing that is a popular talking point. Since it's barely going to affect anyone, it'll be easy to pass. And it may win votes for Republicans in swing districts, since the "BlackRock bought all the houses!" line is heard much more often from the Left, meaning this is something you can show an on-the-fence voter to signal how you are against those evil Wall Street guys. I wonder if he'll be able to resist slipping in some kind of small-time grift for a family member or campaign donor, though.
  • sgc 9mo ago
    He's in real estate. Of course he has an angle. Hopefully they can get something worthwhile into the eventual bill anyways. I would hard cap how many houses anybody can own to something like 4 - whether through an LLC or otherwise. Many countries do not or did not allow foreign ownership of residential real estate. It's definitely not in the interest of any people to have their very land taken from them. In the current climate that would likely take an extremely nasty turn so it's not the best time for it, but I would be very supportive of such a measure with an exception for permanent residents and spouses of US citizens.
• gsibble 9mo ago
  Yeah, that's why Blackstone's stock fell 9% on this news. It doesn't affect them at all.
  • bongodongobob 9mo ago
    [dead]
• pohl 9mo ago
  > But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals... I think the relevant quantity we'd want to look at is what constitutes most of the property being bought-up by investors. Counting investors is going to bias the count towards multitudes of little-guys.
• silisili 9mo ago
  In raw numbers of ownership, sure. But make no mistake, during the housing boom post 2019, in a lot of 'hot' metro areas, "wall street" was buying way more homes than individuals. Especially in the south. In the area I lived in, Invitation Homes, some weird shell company of Blackstone, was buying up every piece of tract housing they could get their hands on. At one point, they were making agreements with builders building out new neighborhoods to not sell to individuals since they wanted them all. So no, I care far less about what my neighbor is doing because he or she isn't attempting to price out an entire city.
  • stvltvs 9mo ago
    Exactly, absolute ownership numbers matter less for housing prices than the proportion of corporate buyers in the market.
  • BeetleB 9mo ago
    Here's a report where you can see which areas have a high percentage of big investors (not just people who own 2-3 homes): https://go.lincolninst.edu/whoa-mapping-corp-ownership-report.pdf https://go.lincolninst.edu/whoa-mapping-corp-ownership-repor...
    • rcpt 9mo ago
      Looking at the map one might conclude that big investors buying up single family homes is a recipe for affordable housing.
      • BeetleB 9mo ago
        LOL - Simpson's Paradox at play here?
• KumaBear 9mo ago
  It might not solve the problem but we also have other countries buying up homes for pension accounts. Take AU for example doing this. Should be illegal regardless of the size.
  • alephnerd 9mo ago
    Pension funds like Ontario Teacher's are institutional investors who would be barred as well according to this proposal.
    • mikkupikku 9mo ago
      As they should be.
      • bluGill 9mo ago
        If they then rent these houses out and keep them maintained I don't care that they own them. Of course they should not be allowed to have a monopoly on houses in any area (including indirect monopoly by agreeing to minimum prices with others). Landlord is an important job that someone needs to do for the people who owning their own house is the wrong decision.
        • hn_acc1 9mo ago
          Even if they are the leader in percentage point rent raises, and do it 5x as often as every other landlord? And blackball a renter they don't like, not from 1 specific house, but from 10K all at once?
          • bluGill 9mo ago
            they don't have a monopoly so the problem is imangined
        • alephnerd 9mo ago
          > If they then rent these houses out and keep them maintained I don't care that they own them... Pension funds don't do that (it's a headache). Instead, they allocate a certain amount of capital to funds specialized in Real Estate who will invest in real estate firms like Greystar who are forced to maximize revenue. Much of the financialization people keep complaining about on HN is because institutional investors are now much more demanding in comparison to 40 years ago when institutional investing meant putting all your money in bonds and a bit of domestic stocks and hoping to get a 5-6% return. Basically, the Yale, OTPPF, and ADIA model goes brrrrrrr as institutional investors now demand double digit returns.
• CPLX 9mo ago
  This is absolutely, violently, incorrect. Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.
  • rick_dalton 9mo ago
    Do you have any source? Googling it tells me otherwise.
    • CPLX 9mo ago
      Here's a few examples: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-big-homebuilders https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi... https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corporate-slumlords https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corpora... It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.
  • orangecat 9mo ago
    Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. Building more housing is the opposite of a problem.
    • CPLX 9mo ago
      It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal. In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market. The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital. We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.
• mattmaroon 9mo ago
  While that’s true, even if “Wall Street” is only holding a few percent of homes, those being released to the markets (and future ones not being purchased) might help. Corporate entity creation in America is such that I don’t think this will be enforceable (“we don’t buy homes, our Gibraltar office’s subsidiary invested in its CEO’s LLC that bought the home”) but if I’m wrong, it could help somewhat. It’s binary thinking to assume that just because it isn’t a one step solution it won’t make a meaningful impact. But still, I think it won’t yet hope I’m wrong.
  • limagnolia 9mo ago
    Not really, because the problem isn't investors buying homes, its a lack of supply of new homes. Big investors don't buy homes to keep them empty, they buy them to rent them out. An exception to this might be short term rentals but that is going to be significant in only a few markets and the problem there is still fundamentally a supply problem.
    • mattmaroon 9mo ago
      But even by long term renting they’re driving up home prices.
  • lbarrow 9mo ago
    Why do you think they aren't on the market right now? These companies buy them so that they can rent them. They are on the rental market!
• tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
  From the moment I saw this in the WSJ this morning, I was wondering what people were going to come up with in order to be against this obviously-good idea, just because Trump said it. Now I know.
  • thejazzman 9mo ago
    I don’t read this as being against it at all. They’re simply pointing out it doesn’t have that big of an impact because of a bigger problem that remains.
    • tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
      Institutional investors collectively nearly a million residential properties in the US, and continue to buy more. When turnover of inventory is only a couple percent a year, owning nearly 1% of the housing stock and not turning it over is a lot. Small landlord property turnover is much higher than institutions. This action would have an impact. Other problems will ALWAYS remain. That's no reason not to make a dent in what can be dented.
  • Analemma_ 9mo ago
    I'm not against the idea per se, but "institutional investors are buying up homes" is an effect, not a cause. Boomers demanded that "house values are never allowed to go down, only up" and put all manner of construction-preventing policy in place to make sure this happened, so of course institutional investors showed up. If there's an asset class which is only allowed to go up, why wouldn't they? Banning institutional investment doesn't remove the "can only go up" laws and mindset, so I think (assuming this even happens, which it probably won't: TACO) the actual effect on prices will be minimal.
    • tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
      I don't know if you've noticed, but politicians aren't in the business of root-cause analysis or actual solutions. They are in the business of making things either slightly better or significantly worse for certain people. This would make the situation slightly better for people who want to buy houses. Perhaps it's the case I'm 100% for this mainly because my extremely low expectations for politicians have been met and exceeded in this circumstance. I don't know why we have to be negative about something that makes a small improvement in something that sucks.
• jay_kyburz 9mo ago
  Yes, It should be expanded that no company can own residential property, and more importantly, each person can only own one property. People should go find something else to invest their savings in.
  • roywiggins 9mo ago
    Would that not make rental properties entirely illegal? That seems... complicated
    • em-bee 9mo ago
      the owner could rent out their own house and rent someone elses. it does make sense if you want to save a nice retirement home for yourself or a place where you want to raise your children while you work and live somewhere else.
      • compsciphd 9mo ago
        that only works with a complete loop of landlord/renters and hence doesn't help anyone rent who can't own themselves....
        • em-bee 9mo ago
          right, i was just trying to point out that it would not make renting single family homes illegal. it doesn't have to be a closed loop though. owners could be (and in my example most likely would be) renting an apartment/flat in the city which is not privately owned)
    • JoshTriplett 9mo ago
      There are people who unironically seem to want to do that.
    • tbrownaw 9mo ago
      I think the idea is that nobody would prefer to rent if given a choice, and that everybody could afford to own if not for the presence of landlords in the market.
• chucksta 9mo ago
  Depends where you are https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-own-nearly-38000-metro-atlanta-homes/P6YSU4WAARGT5KPUYTGE7342BA/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow... |“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
  • mandevil 9mo ago
    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?
    • Loughla 9mo ago
      Is there a difference?
      • lazyasciiart 9mo ago
        Only one of them will be affected by the proposed law.
    • OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
      Both are bad.
    • chucksta 9mo ago
      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?
      • epistasis 9mo ago
        Having personal experience here, I'll take the company owning 10,000 homes over the rich dad any day. That rich dad is desperate, incompetent, and breaks tenant law all the time, ie chaotic evil. The corporation is lawful evil instead which can at least be planned for.
      • 9mo ago
• cmxch 9mo ago
  Cover those individual investors too.
  • dstainer 9mo ago
    Agreed, I think the simple answer is the tax rate is one thing for a primary residence and another for non-primary residences regardless of who owns it. For example in CA, Prop 13 stays in place for your primary residence, but properties are re-assessed every year like in Texas if it's not your primary residence. In addition, take away some (or all) of the tax deductions for SFH that aren't primary residences.
    • sgc 9mo ago
      Rent would go through the roof and it would become even harder to get out of the rental trap. It's better to just have a very low hard cap on the number of properties anyone can own.
      • sapphicsnail 9mo ago
        People being less likely to buy multiple houses is going to make it harder for people to buy a primary residence?
        • sgc 9mo ago
          You think landlords won't pass their costs on to tenants? How do the tenants save when their rent is even more unaffordable than it is now?
• oceanplexian 9mo ago
  > But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Maybe they should clamp down on that as well, especially individuals who are only purchasing SFH in residential neighborhoods as a way to park their overseas cash.
  • seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    Once you try to clamp down on investment properties, you have couples getting divorces so they can own two homes (this happened in China), and all your kids are going to have their own home as well. It isn't a bad idea, people will game whatever. A singapore public housing system might work better, but I doubt it would work for SFHs.
    • ryandrake 9mo ago
      This comment always comes up when regulation is proposed: "But people will just game it!" The solution is not to throw our hands up and say "Well, we just can't regulate this!" The solution is to prevent the gaming, too. Laws should iterate as often as people find clever ways to work around their spirit.
      • LPisGood 9mo ago
        Realistically if the biggest problem is couple’s divorcing to get a second home, then the problem has been pretty well attacked
      • potato3732842 9mo ago
        Why do you people always need to use more jackboot? At some point the juice is not worth the squeeze. If the rule changes fixes it in 9/10 cases and 1/10 games it then call it success and move on.
  • ryandrake 9mo ago
    Exactly. Nobody wants to hear this, because we're all Temporarily Embarrassed Landlords, but if a corporation buying 100 houses to sit on and extract rent is bad (or good), then 100 individuals each buying 1 house to sit on and extract rent must be equally bad (or good).
• Noaidi 9mo ago
  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/2008994494457479462#m https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/200899449445747946... It matters, you just dont want to know it matters.
  • WackyFighter 9mo ago
    A hit in the stock price doesn't prove or disprove their claims. What would disprove their claims is the number of properties Blackrock is buying and if it is affecting pricing at the margin.
    • Noaidi 9mo ago
      Let's say Blackrock, with all their wealth behind them, buys a home in your neighborhood. What do you think they will charge for rent? Market average? Ha! No way. They jack up the rental prices because they can. That makes rental prices rise everywhere in the area.
      • WackyFighter 9mo ago
        If they charged far more than the market average in a given area then people wouldn't rent from them. Even if they bought up the entire area, people would presumably move to cheaper areas where they weren't jacking up the prices.
  • OGWhales 9mo ago
    I don't think a stock market reaction is a good way to measure their impact on the housing market. It's not that they aren't involved in the market, it's that their impact is questionable given the relative size of their participation.
  • rcpt 9mo ago
    Now explain Tesla stock.
  • jcranberry 9mo ago
• foobarian 9mo ago
  And part of the problem may be people like my cousin, who bought a house without selling the old one, choosing to rent it instead.
  • woah 9mo ago
    Why isn't it your cousin's tenant who is the problem?
• bs7280 9mo ago
  I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the entire cost of the property to a bank in the form of interest payments. Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.
  • sharpy 9mo ago
    That sounds nice, but I think that increased tax will just be passed down as higher rent.
    • almosthere 9mo ago
      Long term these non-occupants will sell as other properties are being purchased by x-renters.
    • jspaetzel 9mo ago
      Higher rent means more people will opt to buy. That's not necessarily a bad thing in perspective. Assuming the other side effect is a decrease in costs due to a lower profit margin.
      • RegEx 9mo ago
        I believe your comment is operating under the assumption that people are merely choosing to rent over buying because it's the more economically wise choice. That's not how things work in reality. Many people want to buy but cannot put up the initial costs.
        • lawlessone 9mo ago
          > Many people want to buy but cannot put up the initial costs. This, monthly rent actually costs more here in Ireland than what you would pay monthly for mortgage.
• mycodebreaks 9mo ago
  Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.
  • lbarrow 9mo ago
    Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.
    • KptMarchewa 9mo ago
      This will release homes on the market, which will lower the prices, causing the rents to drop.
    • baq 9mo ago
      but it'll lower mortgages, which will lower rents.
    • AstroBen 9mo ago
      Would it not also lower house prices, causing would-be renters to buy instead, reducing demand for rentals?
      • jazzyjackson 9mo ago
        This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Yes mortgage is often cheaper than rental, but the whole tradeoff is the commitment, just like all kinds of services, if you pay 40 years up front you can get a good deal, but do you really want to take out a loan to do that? Limiting landlords ability to buy property is reducing demand for construction, you want to increase demand for housing, not decrease it. As I said in a sibling thread, it does suck that property owners are incentivized to raise their property values, preventing supply from reacting to demand.
• robotsquidward 9mo ago
  Perfect for a big splashy press release. Populist policy with no practical benefit to the average American.
  • iknowSFR 9mo ago
    I worked with these firms for several years when the business concept was in its earlier stages. The money coming in to buy these homes quickly went from family offices (2013-2019) to state pension funds (2019-present) to sovereign funds (2020-present). Things like the largest pension fund in Sweden is invested in buying SFR. Or the sovereign fund of the UAE. I’m not sure if that changed your opinion on this not having practical benefit for the average American.
    • twoodfin 9mo ago
      More demand for homes makes homes more valuable and encourages more supply! Why is this a problem? Build more homes, get rich from the Swedes!
• observationist 9mo ago
  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 massively outsized downstream impact contrasted against their relatively tiny overall participation in the market, and they can afford to behave in ways that manipulate the behavior of the majority. If you can decouple them from the housing markets, you also decouple the interests of the donor class, and you allow for policy that doesn't maximize the cost of real estate over the interests of the majority of the population.
  • WalterBright 9mo ago
    > 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 another house for less.
    • observationist 9mo ago
      It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in order to raise or lower prices in an area, or using other mechanics to manipulate pricing, across the entire market, depending on the intended actions. If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area, if they intend to rent, they can afford to impose artificial scarcity until they force renters to meet their rates, and so on. Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down, nor do they have the capabilities to influence markets. Even tiny percentage shifts can result in significant fluctuations in the prices consumers see. It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence.
• jncfhnb 9mo ago
  I feel like this article is littered with suspicious statements Like this one: > In fact, institutional homebuyers (those who bought 100+ homes in a 12-month period) didn’t even reach 2.5% market share at the peak level in this data line, which goes back to the start of the century. I don’t know how to evaluate this. I doubt this analysis rolls up subsidiaries. So what does it really mean for an entity to own 100+ units? Is that actually something we care about? Imo only thing people need to give a shit about is whether a house is being bought to be lived in.
• mbesto 9mo ago
  Also, the headline on HN is downright wrong. "US will ban Wall Street investors" != "Trump says he will ban Wall Street investments..." This a Truth Social post from the President. It doesn't mean it has happened, will happen or will happen in the form that either Trump says it will or is being implied here. This is a very difficult issue to properly address for lots of legal/logistical reasons. For example - many legitimate homeowners have their homes registered as LLCs and most home legislation is governed by states.
  • GolfPopper 9mo ago
    After a decade of national politics, and many decades of his "business", too many people still take "Trump says" as anything more than a piece of a con.
• 827a 9mo ago
  Its true that its a small number, but when you look at the statistics as a function of "percentage of homes purchased in 2024" instead of "total percentage ownership of homes", it is a bit more substantial: My understanding is the number is closer to 2% for Institutional investors, and as high as 4% for major markets like Phoenix and Dallas. What it will come down to is the exact wording of what Trump means by "large institutional investors" (his exact words on Truth).
• runjake 9mo ago
  > Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are. I'm pretty naive to the issue, but awhile back I took a look at property records for my neighborhood. In fact, equity firms, including BlackRock, were buying up a bunch of houses in my neighborhood. A tiny datapoint, I know. Edit: It might've been Blackstone. It's been about a year since I looked it up. Edit 2: Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?
  • wiredpancake 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • tpmoney 9mo ago
    > Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit? I never went far enough to get all the details back when I was considering a move, but my impression is a lot of these "buy your home and close fast" corporate purchasers were offering just enough to make the speed and ability to not have to make a lot of major improvements worth the lost money from selling on the market. Then they do just enough work to clean up any "show stopper" problems and re-sell at market prices. So (very simplified) if you have a home that might sell for 200k on the market if you put 10k of work into it, but you need to move in a few months, and you need to pay off 100k on the loan, the company offers you something like 180k. You walk away with 80k (instead of 90k) in your pocket and avoid the various real estate agent fees and the need to do any of the fix up work or deal with trying to sell and move at the same time. The company puts the $10k of work into it and sells for the 200k, pocketing the $10k you gave up.
• cyanydeez 9mo ago
  Random private equity newspaper isn't the most convincing source.
• firesteelrain 9mo ago
  I can only provide anecdotal information. In my HOA community we had to make a rule that you need to live in your home for two years before you can rent it. This effectively stopped the companies like Innovation Homes from buying up properties in our neighborhood. Post housing crisis-2015 it was getting pretty bad with the investors purchasing the single family homes. I don’t know if places like Innovation Homes qualifies as “Wall Street” or not.
• paulddraper 9mo ago
  Moreover, the fundamental problem is lack of supply. Building has not kept pace with growth in households.
• austin-cheney 9mo ago
  Where I live, in the fastest growing big city in the US, it is absolutely commercial investment firms buying up all the homes. I used to get calls several times a week from these guys want to buy my house in cash. I stopped taking their calls and now it has slowed to only a few calls per month. The last call I took, last year, they were ready to buy my house in cash at market value without looking at the property. The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are rentals, and there are thousands of houses in my neighborhood under the same HOA.
• pksebben 9mo ago
  (forgive me if I don my aluminum chapeau going forward) > Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are. So in '08 we saw the veil drop on the mortgage folks. For a brief moment the sort of advantage they were taking of individual homeowners (I'm including landlords here) was plain for all to see, because the systems they had built to extract that value had been pushed too far and started to break. The really clever/evil/nasty thing that happened next was that they all said "we're sowwy" and pretended to close up shop on the Mortgage Backed Securities markets, while sowing the seeds for a resurgence in mortgage lending by having Fannie run REO-to-Rental programs that sold foreclosed homes in bulk to investors. It would have been too obvious in the numbers if large institutional investors had bought those directly, so they let mom and pop go into business as landlords, effectively buying obfuscation of the stream of finances for the cost of whatever margins they had to take a hit on to allow for low interest rates to pump housing prices up to a place where, like in 07, they could go back to fucking around with mortages. In less word salady terms, the plan looked like so: - "oh fuck we pushed it too far and here come the torches and pitchforks" - Stop making money on mortgages, but we're investment banks as well as mortgage lenders, so we can make up for the loss of mortgage money by buying a more significant fraction of the housing market at near-zero interest rates - Wait for low interest rates to pump housing prices over time - Okay cool, people have forgotten about the whole 08 thing and we've peeled back all the subsequent regulation so we can go back to making our money bundling risky ass mortgage securities again <--- we are here> The essence of the problem as I see it is that finance has gotten so byzantine and complicated that the only people who understand it in real time are the people who are actively trying to manipulate it to maximize their profits, and by the time it becomes clear what dirty tricks they're pulling they've moved on to the next grift so it looks like they're innocent.
• rayiner 9mo ago
  Correct. More specifically, your upper middle class neighbors whose incomes have grown far more than middle earners over the past few decades: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/cbo-data-income-growth.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/cb... The people responsible for the cost crunch middle class people feel isn’t billionaires. Bezos isn’t using his money to buy up houses or daycare spots in your neighborhood or Disney Word tickets. It’s upper quantile white collar workers. They are competing with the middle class for the same goods and services, but make much more money relatively than they did in past decades.
• hopelite 9mo ago
  I agree, but besides the fact that people overlook that the “C” in LLC is “Corporate” and most private rental investors will have put their real estate in an LLC; is that the real problem at the core is cheap, i.e., devalued money and low lending standards, that has made inefficient and reckless lending and investing possible, essentially the inverse of the BNPL ticking time bomb and the cousin of the housing bubble, i.e., fraud. With house prices being driven up by reckless lending through a debased currency, you enter a feedback loop where every inflating currencies drive prices higher, which only fuels a further frenzy of lending (including through FOMO) to driver prices higher once again.
• themafia 9mo ago
  > 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.
• subpixel 9mo ago
  > 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.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• jimt1234 9mo ago
  This doesn't match what's been going on in my area. A local newspaper reported about a year ago that Black Rock owns 40% of the rental units.
• aaron695 9mo ago
  [dead]
• HEmanZ 9mo ago
  The (now somehow) political position that blackrock is not the reason a house in Seattle is $1,000,000 is somehow the most hated position in America. Both my left wing friends and right wing family believe blackrock owns something like 30% of houses in America, and saying otherwise is heresy.
• tootie 9mo ago
  There is no key word here. It's an aspirational assertion on social media. Everyone asking about how it will be implemented is asking questions Trump has spent zero seconds considering. He will maybe sign some EO that will have very limited scope but mostly he is asking Congress to figure it out. Given the makeup of the Senate it will require bipartisan support which means at least months of haggling if they even consider his request. So we really have no idea what the policy will be or when we'll see it.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• dev1ycan 9mo ago
  I love these professional lawyers running defense for large corporations.
• throw__away7391 9mo ago
  People are always looking for an outside villain in this story. Over the years it's been "Chinese buyers", AirBnBs, private equity, or "the rich" generally, but the thing is that the system is working exactly as it is supposed to. Middle class homeowners demand that their homes go up in value every year and they get what they want. Homes are explicitly called investments my every mainstream organization with any stake in the game. The ones responsible are indeed your neighbors, but not just the ones with investment properties. Talk to these people and between complaints about the price of eggs going up a buck or two you'll hear them mention "property values" frequently in casual conversation and beam with pride as they show you their Zillow Zestimate. Your government is happy for the increase in tax revenue (even as they carve out exemptions for their voter base). The ever increasing prices are all going to be paid by future generations, so there is no need to worry. If Black Rock is guilty of anything here above all else, it's taking advantage of a situation deliberately created for someone else. If government policy wasn't already going balls to the wall trying to constantly pump up property values, there'd be no investment returns to be had. Give me the levers of federal, state, and local government and I promise you I can completely tank property values in 48 hours or less.
• itake 9mo ago
  I think it depends on the market. Atlanta specifically when I was flipping houses in 2012-2015 had a lot of corporate investors buying up low income properties, fixing them up, then renting them out.
• axus 9mo ago
  Are my neighbors the ones sending me unsolicited text messages and letters about how they'd like to buy my property?
• Spooky23 9mo ago
  It really depends on the market. The institutional investors are common in the South and Southwest. I think the fact that they exist at all is a problem. You are correct however that smaller private investors are more common. I live in a small city. Small property management companies from NYC and NJ are pretty commonly buying up 2-4 family houses. I suspect that some of these "small" players aren't small at all, but hiding in a maze of LLCs. I know a couple of dudes from way back that have leveraged their way to a real estate empire with >2000 homes in the region.
• gamblor956 9mo ago
  Unless your neighbor happens to be named Mr. Black Rock, private equity and wall street investors are indeed the #1 buyers of residential housing stock right now.
• mjbale116 9mo ago
  > Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are. This is a common trope. "It's not big conglomerates that buy and hodl the homes where families are supposed to live, its mom and pop investors so please be nice." Having a home is not something to speculate with or leave it to the supposed "market forces". Housing projects and regulation is what this country needs, yesterday.
• razingeden 9mo ago
  A better example than Blackrock is Arrived: "The Arrived team is cracked, and I love the audacity of their vision: a stock market for real estate," said Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, in a release. "I'm betting on them to democratize and digitize access to America's $50 trillion in residential real estate." [0] Should housing be a “$50 trillion” market for fractional ownership, bundled with its own secondary/speculative market to turn around and flip like penny stocks? Lovely knowing I can have “access” to that platform and own a 0.004% share in a house someone somewhere out there lives in (rents). While I’ll probably never own a house again. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/13/arrived-launches-trading-platform-for-shares-of-rental-homes.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/13/arrived-launches-trading...
• deleted 9mo ago
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• erkt 9mo ago
  I would be very against individual investors not being allowed to buy property for investment. I think most people can agree that corporations like blackstone/rock shouldn't be manipulating markets. It would be very bad to force blackrock to liquidate its current holdings of 230k homes. It could crater the entire industry and it runs into ex-post-facto issues. Assets need to maintain value or banks will fail.
• Vegenoid 9mo ago
  If so, then we can at least put that myth to rest and move closer to a real solution. The only potential downside I see here is that maybe it pushes the real solution a bit further down the road.
• cik 9mo ago
  This is meaningless, even with "Wall Street", as you've said. Several companies raise funds, to buy these homes. Institutions the like of Blackrock and REITs invest in these funds, all the time. This isn't new at all, and has been happening for years. It's just been accelerating. Add to that startups like Arrived, and there's simply more pressure on this market then ever before, sadly.
• fergie 9mo ago
  https://econofact.org/factbrief/do-private-equity-firms-own-20-of-single-family-homes https://econofact.org/factbrief/do-private-equity-firms-own-... > "Large institutional investors, defined as those owning over 100 homes (which includes private equity firms), own 3 percent of the single-family rental stock nationwide according to Brookings. This share is higher in some local markets — in the 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas where these investors are most present, they own 12.4 percent" I personally believe that its problematic that large institutional investors own 12.4% of single family properties in the 20 main metro areas of the US.
• a2tech 9mo ago
  You're right. It doesn't matter though. People love 'big fixes', the reality of systemic change is hard to present in a 2 minute sound bite or Instagram reel. This is the kind of 'fix' that gets implemented, then when things don't magically improve people will just give up.
• graemep 9mo ago
  They do seem to have a significant impact on prices though: https://www.reri.org/research/files/big_ltrs_and_housing_markets_reri_2024.pdf https://www.reri.org/research/files/big_ltrs_and_housing_mar...
• helsinkiandrew 9mo ago
  > "Resident experience is hurting as a result," said Jeff Holzmann, COO of RREAF Holdings, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm with over $5 billion in assets. "Instead of you calling your landlord to discuss a problem, you're calling a call center that gives you the runaround." I'm not sure I understand the difference between "Wall Street" buying up all the property and real estate investment firms like RREAF doing the same, or come to that the guy down the street buying a few properties to rent out. A small company or single investor can buy up a large percentage of local available property and be just as bad a landlord.
• snarf21 9mo ago
  I thought one of the big problem with Wall Street buying housing inventory is that they were turning them into AirBnbs because that is more profitable (generally) than renting. This pressure takes a lot of units off of the market for normal people to rent or buy and makes holding on to your last house a lot more profitable as a rental. I think if we get rid of these (basically) unregulated hotel exception and forced people who who AirBnb to live in that property as a primary residence 180 days a year, then the inventory could correct. Obviously, the other factor in home prices is zoning and people who own wanting to keep supply down so their house is guaranteed to appreciate. Affordable housing (just like homelessness) in the US is only a problem because we lack the political will to solve it.
• gosub100 9mo ago
  Black rock shouldn't buy any family homes. Not a single one. I'm sick of the arguments that rely on the meaning of "most/many/some/not all". The arguments are irrefutable because you can always weasel your way through the meaning of the quantifier, or the false implication that only the "biggest" of something needs redress before the next in line. A person owning a second home is fine, that's one of the paths towards financial independence: small business ownership. Someone starting out in a tiny money making operation is a good thing, and they do not need to compete with a trillion dollar empire!
• skeeter2020 9mo ago
  It has definitely cooled dramatically; even reasonable interest rates make the numbers pretty meh. This feels very similar to the Canadian narrative that foreign (read: Chinese) investors are buying all the houses in Vancouver & Toronto. Does it happen? absolutely, but it's also a nice way to blame a segment that has no voice or recourse. It also allows us to turn a blind eye to the impact of a generation of essentially zero % interest rates and a country that holds twice as much of their wealth in houses as the US. Other popular targets: out-of-province home owners, vacation property owners, multi-generational properties.
• anon291 9mo ago
  Daily reminder that the largest purchasers of residential real estate through these intermediary firms (since that's all they are... they own them in trust for others) are public employee pension plans.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• aaravchen 9mo ago
  The real contention is two fold: investors are collectively pricing out non-investors that would presumably actually live in the home they purchased, and among investors, institutional investors are both positioned to ignore market pressures and constitute too large a portion of the market, restricting even rental availability and affordability of the homes. The reason institutional investors are blamed is that they usually have significant holdings elsewhere, and demonstrably will just wait out a market, taking loses they write off against their other businesses in the meantime, rather than actually participating in it. That ability to wait out the market on a finite resource rather than participating is usually otherwise only seen during antitrust market activities. The fact that many cities are considering adding significant vacancy taxes on properties, citing specifically this behavior as a driving factor, is pretty damning. Additionally, it's not necessary for these institutional investors that are ignoring the market pressures to own a majority, or even that large of a share. Any portion they own and ignore the market for is effectively just removed from the market entirely and reduces the remaining pool of what's available. And the second-order effect is an overall damping of market responsiveness since they are simply refusing to respond to the demand half of supply and demand. I don't have the models to run the math myself, but it should theoretically be possible to calculate how much their involvement without participation impacts the prices as a relation to market share, and I'll bet it's a nonlinear result with a steep curve at even low volumes.