For reference this estimate from 2000 (Atlanta has grown a lot since then) estimates there are 1,370,000 housing units in the "ten country" metro Atlanta area.
The estimate in this study is that three different companies own a combined 19,000 housing units in the "five county" metro Atlanta area.
I realize these aren't 1:1 comparisons, but they are the best I can find. That suggests each company probably owns less than 0.5% of the area housing supply.
Open to other estimates, but think they would be pretty close to mine.
This market structure is frequent in Germany, where many more people rent than in the US, and they mostly rent from large real estate companies specialized in housing.
In Germany it's not controversial at all and this I'm surprised to see the controversy around these corporate landlords in the US.
3 companies owning 11% of the single family homes available for rent in a metro area doesn't seem like a massive concentration of ownership. Some people prefer to rent rather than buy. Some people don't have savings for a down payment. Someone needs to own the houses that these people rent.
There are probably economies of scale to managing rental properties (e.g. larger companies can hire full time maintenance staff). Some people prefer to rent from small-time landlords, but those can have there problems too.
Is it the maze of LLCs? That does seem problematic.
If they have so much pricing power, why are their returns less than SP500? Who would want to lose money compared to a risk-less investment where you don’t have to do any work?
If so then antitrust laws kick in from three different companies colluding on this.
However, I'm skeptical of much pricing control. Few other markets have such widely distributed market share. There is some stickiness in that people don't want to move often, but unless there's a major shortage (which would be the true cause of high prices), it's hard for a 5% owner to exert much on the market.
Theses companies are part of a larger trend of the Atlanta rental market coming to be dominated by investors.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a whole report on this last year:
I think there's concern that if you manage to buy 11% then you can keep expanding. We've all seen what happens when a company captures enough market that there are no alternatives left:
Netflix, Prime: commercials and limiting devices per household
Gmail: no longer unlimited storage as promised
OpenAI: still competing so remains to be seen
If these companies are being subsidized by investors to capture market those investors will want a return and things will get nasty.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Paramount, Disney??? There's a crapton of players trying to make streaming happen, and no evidence that they're making massive margins.
Many people complain about streaming fragmentation not the other way around. And it's an extremely optional product.
And did Google ever actually promise unlimited storage for all time? (And there's still a lot of free storage. I finally broke down and added some more but just so I could avoind managing how much I was using.)
Yes, a moment's thought should reveal that this is the case.
Buying and selling a house costs about 10% (or more) (realtors, expenses, etc). So if you buy a house today for $200k, and sell it tomorrow for $200k you will lose about $20k. (Yes, there are flipping tricks and stuff you can do to reduce that, but there are costs for normal transactions.)
So the rule of thumb is "about seven years" - if you buy today, and sell in seven years, appreciation and such will "break even". Certainly if appreciation was insanely high, that will be a shorter period, if it is bad or a crash happens, it may be longer or even underwater.
But whatever the time period is, if you will not live in the house for that number of years, you're better off renting, unless rental prices are so high as to invert it.
Another example of this is where businesses often prefer to lease (even so far as to triple-net) for tax purposes and to free up capital.
>88% of Americans would rather own a home than rent. Specifically, 76% of renters would rather own a home, but only 2% of homeowners would rather rent.
I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters, so we can deduce that 20-24% of renters actually want to rent, and some percentage of the remainder might go back to renting if they had a bad ownership experience.
Though some percentage of those renters are in highly favorable situations, like rent-controlled units that would be insanely more expensive on the open market.
>I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters
I see, so maybe selling isn't that big of a hassle then? People keep bringing it up as evidence that people would rather rent, but that really doesn't seem to be the case.
> Why would someone prefer to give away money instead of invest it into their net worth ?
You mean… how. Cash? Mortgage? Buying is easy, running the thing not necessarily. What are you going to do if you lose the job? Health? What’s your plan for when you get old? Do you see the work around the house?
Do you remember Lehman Brothers and why it happened? Because so many thought they could afford it! Have they increased their net worth?
Is that a new build? Second hand? How old? When is the roof to be replaced? Hows the isolation? What’s the quality of windows and doors? Is the electrical installation ready for solar panels? And so on…
> Are there really people that prefer renting, and wouldn’t buy even if they could afford to?
I'm glad I own a house but it can be a massive headache, expense, and time sink. It also places a big constraint on moving as you say. I absolutely wouldn't have wanted one the first 15 years or so out of school and I've been lucky enough that jobs have never forced me to move.
Ease of movement is such a meme.
Every time I've sold houses in 2nd or 3rd tier markets they've sold and gone into escrow in less than 2 months.
Maybe back when housing wasn't so tight this was the case. That isn't it anymore. Sure you have to queue up a bunch of things like a realtor and a mortgage broker but the benefits of getting equity outweigh the supposed convenience of renting .
It's also often house vs. apartment. There's absolutely friction associated with moving from a house with its contents to another house than there is to moving from, say, a 1000 sq. ft. apartment to another. It's still a move but it's much less of an undertaking and, as a renter, you also tend to have a mindset that you will be moving.
Probably the majority at what they think the house should cost. Probably very few at what the monthly payment for a market rate mortgage + downpayment actually costs, based on the recent run-up in home values and interest rates over the past 3-4 years.
E.g. would you prefer to rent the same house at $2000 month, or own at $4000/mo? It might not be this bad in Atlanta but in many areas the rent/buy ratio is that bad now.
Yeah. I live in an old house on a little bit of property. It's paid-off but it's still probably something close to $2K/month between property taxes, insurance, utilities/oil, and more or less steady state maintenance--some of which could probably be deferred but...
It's totally worth the exercise (it's not terribly hard) to "rent to yourself" on paper, just to get a feel for everything involved.
And like you see, it is much more than you'd expect at first, because so many things only "pop up" every 10/20/30 years. A $20k roof replacement done every 30 years is $60 a month or so, and how many of those kind of things are hiding in a house? Hint: the depreciation tables from the IRS are not a gift ...
I used to (half-)joke that had I known how much work and money my house was going to be, I'd probably just have gone with a newer condo.
I agree with the points upthread that a lot of people like the idea of home ownership but don't appreciate all the ongoing costs--including the amortized costs of unexpected things. (I just paid $1K to get a big tree that came down dealt with which fortunately didn't cause any actual damage.
>In ideal situations, I think almost everyone would prefer owning over renting.
I don't think that's true at all especially for people earlier in life/career. Even had I had more money in a brokerage account, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made a home purchase (whether single family house or condo) before I did. And I don't think that's all that unusual for people 10 years out of school or so.
Yes, I was at a point when I could afford it but I was also mentally ready to put down some more roots.
>88% of Americans would rather own a home than rent. Specifically, 76% of renters would rather own a home, but only 2% of homeowners would rather rent.
That’s a completely dumb statistic since it doesn’t talk about the cost. Of course someone would rather have something rather than nothing, if the something cost nothing. In reality, if the “something” cost $1 Million and only saved you $2500/mo, is it actually preferred?
For awhile, I was friendly with a person who had a lot of material success and was recently retired.
He explained why he preferred renting to me: In the end, it was less hassle for him. All of the "upkeep" was someone else's responsibility. He just wrote a check every month.
It’s a massive amount. But what is more sickening is that we are treating a place to live like a market to corner and profitize. Three companies own 19,000 houses! 19,000 houses that aren’t available for people to buy, 19,000 houses that raised the price of all other houses, and 19,000 houses to milk renters for every cent they have like people in the pods in the Matrix.
This isn’t an isolated event either. There are lots and lots of other companies.
Capitalism is defined as a system of relations which prioritizes the right for one to exercise their existing capital to accumulate more of it, above everything else and indefinitely.
I don't begrudge any company investing and expanding their business, but when there are so many LLCs and layers of complexity to get problems resolved (as stated in the article) seems rather like an intentional obfuscation.
I recently set up a personal LLC and remember reading something about real estate investors making an individual LLC for each property as a way of limiting their liability. If you can't pay one mortgage then you still keep all your other homes. Those LLCs are then managed by another LLC.
"Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." - from Wikipedia, but that's more or less the classic definition. I think there are many potent critiques of a poorly regulated capitalist environment one can make without twisting the definition.
Housing is something that has been spectacularly fucked in the US for historical reasons - white flight, zoning, redlining, Reagan-era policies to enrich the white burbs in perpetuity. Most of the policies that are aiding property speculators and mass landlords were intended to help "grandma keep her house," and keep "those kinds of folks" away. Naturally business noticed that this was an insanely good deal for the American homeowner and decided to get in on it, and in a large-business friendly regulatory environment we have a hard time making the case that these companies are doing something wrong.
Seems like this is a general and sadly accelerating trend that we don't own anything any more. We don't own the movies or music we pay for, we rent it. We're not allowed to repair our own devices and machines and finally we can't afford a place to live so are stuck in a perpetual rent loop.
We truly live in a dystopian reality but we're not revolting because we have been slowly boiled like the proverbial frog. There will be time when the people rise up and it will not be pretty.
I'm worried about the housing crisis that is gripping so many countries where regular people are utterly incapable of buying houses because they're wildly unaffordable and there are not enough.
Private companies can profit of commercial real estate. They can profit off manufacturing and consulting.
They should not be allowed to profit on thing basic essentials that people in our society need to live when doing so means some people simply miss out.
How would you feel if we were at a buffet for every meal and a private company took so much food you and your family got barely scraps, day after day, year after year?
We don't worry about food because we have an abundance of it, maybe not quite at the right ratios but enough that basically nobody starves. So we should do that for housing - build so much of it that pretty much anyone can get a home. The issue is that, not that 3 companies hold a miniscule 0.64% of an area's housing.
As soon as we decide to start building houses. Probably by liberalising planning, but also by reducing the cost of the matereials. Housing poverty is a choice made by governments, mostly on behalf of everyday people who want their home to appreciate. But banning companies from owning houses isn't going to solve anything. It's a symptom, not a cause.
Having rented a single family home from a "small" landlord, and rented an apartment in a large building owned by a corporate landlord, and having had far worse experiences with law-breaking and exploitation from the "small" landlords, I really have no idea at all what motivates this thinking.
At least the corporate landlord isn't going to control the local planning process to block housing, like small landlords and homeowners residents do.
But to me, a corporation owning a home and renting it out is no worse than anybody else renting it out, and given that they likely are more rule-abiding and knowledgeable about the rules, it's often a big win.
Small-landlords are almost always a "mistake" on one side or the other. Most of them have an incorrect assessment of the costs associated with being a landlord, and this depresses the rental market and also traps them, making them do unethical and illegal things, like not maintaining properties, etc. And if the only reason they're renting their property is because it appreciated and they're carrying a low-interest rate mortgage, they're almost certainly not accounting for the costs. When people realize you can't rent properties profitably and pay a property management firm to manage it, they realize they're not a landlord, they're an underpaid property management firm for the bank. That only makes sense if appreciation is nuts and you can go long on huge leverage.
The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses.
I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties
If a behavior is occurring that is technically legal but the majority believe the behavior is harmful/undesirable we pass laws to stop that behavior.
In this case, stopping or slowing this is actually pretty simple: Change the tax code which is currently overly favorable to real estate investors.
Specifically: No accelerated depreciation, stretch out the depreciation schedule to 40 years from 27.5, stop allowing 1031 exchanges, eliminate real estate step up tax basis on death, etc.
Do the majority believe that 3 companies owning 19,000 homes between them in a particular city is harmful/undesirable behavior? Why? There's nothing obviously bad about that fact alone. How many houses are in Atlanta? The possibility that there are hundreds of LLCs shared between these 3 companies seems a bit suspect on the surface, but I could see how they could be simply acquiring smaller companies naturally. Idk how difficult it is or isn't to consolidate smaller LLCs into larger ones, but the implication of the article seems to be that this is a deliberate tactic to limit the amount of money these companies can be sued for in any one given case. Maybe, but would need more details to see that this is clearly what is happening and how much harm it is causing to aggrieved tenants.
I dare say the majority of renters feel the "rent is too damn high" - I've rarely found someone wishing they could pay more rent for what they're currently in (usually if they can afford more rent they move to something bigger/better).
So the missing link is somehow proving the causality between "rents are high" and "3 companies own 19,000 rentals". That may seem obvious but could be very difficult to prove, especially as it may not be correct. Walmart owns 25% of the grocery business in the USA - does anyone really think grocery prices would go down if they divested? (It may still be better for society for them to do so, lowest price is not the only measurement, of course.)
Yea, I don’t think the LLC liability game is that big of a deal.
First, most of these companies will hold large liability insurance protection.
But also, if someone sues and can prove negligence they can go further up the chain to the individual holding companies making the LLC shell game irrelevant.
None of those would do much against these behemoths, but they would harm the smallest landlords (which might be the intention).
The "best" might be to adjust property tax on a given description of dwelling unit such that it's pretty annoyingly high, but each family effectively gets one for free. Then corporations and multi-unit owners would pay that, but individuals wouldn't.
Prop 13 in CA would be much less of an issue if it excluded commercial real estate and only applied to "homesteads" owned and held by the resident owners.
Companies don’t pay property tax, their renters do.
I say this as someone who owned rental properties in an area that jacked up property taxes. Me and all the other landlords simply raised rent to compensate.
Sure, companies never pay anything, their customers do.
But if your property tax was 200%, and a home-owner's was 1%, things would change.
Now the argument about what the "minimal available housing" should be would come into play, because people who could not buy no matter what would now be homeless ...
Why? Like genuinely, why? Metro Artlanta has a population of 6,237,435 people. With an average of ~2.1 persons per household, that gives 2.97 million homes in Metro Atlanta. These companies own 0.64% of them.
Walmart owns 25% of the entire US grocery market. 11% of a certain class of homes split between 3 companies doesn't strike me as too bad. There's always the other 89% of single-family homes to rent if they get too pushy or expensive, or of course non single-family homes. Or areas just outside the core counties, like Athens or Columbus.
I fucking _wish_ I could rent from corporate landlords. The few times I have they've been _miles_ better than the amateur landlords that own most of my city.
The surprising thing is corporate landlords owning single-family homes. That is the aberration; most corporate landlords want to own multi-tenant buildings to eke out a bit more profit from the economies of scale.
The fact that they do own 19,000 homes is indicative of appreciation being insane (and they're gambling on that, when it slows down they'll dump) OR they're stuck with them for whatever reason and trying to deal with it as best they can (banks in the 2000s crisis often did NOT rent the houses they foreclosed on, because it would cost them more than just leaving them empty).
Which suggests the market is broken somewhere. At least here in the UK, the land a house is around half the price of the home. Which is insane, and suggests the market is broken by limited access to land. Which is _directly_ controlled by local governments.
In a just society, why would anyone own a house? Wouldn't we all be renters, and the rent would be reasonable, and we wouldn't be saddled with worrying about major home repairs, and we should have strong protections from being evicted, and we would be able to move to some other house without going through a huge real estate deal?
In a just society we'd have something akin to a land value tax.
That would make land-lording into a low profit respectable profession and would drive slumlords out of business. The only way to profit would be to actually be good at it would be to manage homes well. Margins would come from that, not from property speculation (how trump made his money).
It would also create a titanic amount of tax revenue from the non-productive economy (land hoarding) which would mean that taxes could be reduced or even eliminated on the productive economy (e.g. income taxes).
Ownership comes with privileges for the cost. Sure, you have to deal with major repairs, but you also get to choose the designs, colors, layout, and more for your house, and you don't have someone watching over your shoulder to "preserve their investment" beyond the bank requiring insurance.
Ownership has other advantages for society beyond that, there's a reason people say "drive it like a rental".
I know a lot of people look at this sort of rhetoric and write it off as absurd, but I think your underlying point is correct: the people who do this sort of thing are probably in the top 10% in terms of making the world a worse place. For many though this is a tough pill to swallow, so you end up in the situation we're in now: daily posts about the collapse of the "social contract", mental health crises, and institutional dysfunction, while completely ignoring the underlying causes.
That being said, the last thing we need is more people in prison
The closest I have ever gotten to somebody articulating how it makes the world worse was a homeowner saying that they didn't like it because it allowed renters into their neighborhood.
But I'm guessing there's some other reason that you think this makes the world worse. Can you tell me how?
I can try, but it'll depend on where you're coming from. A few preliminary questions: how many close people in your life (family, friends, spouse, you yourself) are currently live in rental housing? How many own rental housing?
This is an inauspicious start... would your answer change based on how I answer?
I have lived in rental housing far longer than I have owned a house, and my personal politics are such that I don't think that land should be private property. I don't associate with landlords. None of my family members have ever been landlords, but again, why would this matter? (Edit: and I am younger than 50 in California, most of my friends are renters and have little hope of ever buying a home, and more friends have been forced to leave the state due to high housing costs than I have friends currently. The churn of displacement makes me furious)
The only real reason (and one that I heartily disagree with) to be against corporate ownership of single family homes is that it gives renters access to the amenities that have been hidden behind the door of a 20% down payment in a wealthy neighborhood.
Yes. I have a ton of bias around this issue, and I would imagine most people who care about it (in whatever way) do as well. I think it's much more productive to be attentive to those biases, rather than pretend they don't exist.
Consider the word "landlord". Imagine two people are trying to have conversation about the ethics of rental housing: for one of those people, a "landlord" is the person who broke the law and kicked their family our of their house; for the other, a "landlord" is their brother, who they know to be a reasonable and ethical person. Words mean really different things to different people, and that shapes the whole process of communication. If you did have family or friends who owned rental property, then I'd want to take a step back and think more carefully about how to try to find common ground.
No, not at all, it doesn't make any sense. The closest I can think is that you do not have a solid connection from a value system to a reason that corporations should not own single family homes.
I don't have to agree with the value system to understand the reasoning that somebody opposes corporate SFH ownership. I disagree heartily with the value system that prioritizes homeowners over renters, and views renters as disposable. But that is the only value system that I can concieve of that has a clear and reasonable argument that corporate home ownership is bad.
If you want to argue that landlords should not exist, great! If you want to argue that corporations should not exist, great! However, the particular combination that corporations should not be landlords of single family homes (but somehow multi-unit buildings is OK), has always proven to be a completely incoherent and untenable position. At least as far as I can tease out of people.
My best understanding is that the superiority of homeowners in US culture is so strong that people think that corporations shouldn't be able to have a chance at making the same profits that individual homeowners do off of housing. The core problem is the profits, not who is making the profits, but nobody seems to want to admit that homeowner profits are making housing unaffordable. And I view this obsession with corporate ownership of SFH as a way of addressing the core political problem at the heart of our affordability crisis.
I expressed it in pretty simple terms. You can disagree with my opinion, but if you don't understand it at all then I'm not sure what else there is for me to do.
Or lobby/advocate for establishment of new laws that might be needed now, which may not have been needed in the past.
Humans are inventive and creative (and often greedy). Once we find a loophole or a point of advantage, we tend to exploit it.
For better or worse, the US legal system is slow to change so it takes a long time of people exploiting the system before the legal framework catches up.
This morning I was reading some outrage post in a local facebook group for my small town. Everyone is up in arms about a new apartment complex being built. Then someone chimes in on the thread asking where everyone was when the permits were approved (hint: no one complaining attended the meetings to voice their concerns). TLDR: get involved in local politics. Too many people assume someone else will do it (or other people will vote so I don't have to), and rarely is that the case.
In a just society we would have laws that prevent this sort of thing, instead of lobbying by these corporations to prevent the passing of them in the first place, so people like you can go “well it’s not illegal therefore it’s ok”
"Stripping property rights from 10 million people" has a certain ring to it that is sure to garner bi-partisan support. I'm sure our congressmen can write some water tight legislation to do with with minimal second order effects.
Based on what law? If you can't identify an actual law they're breaking, then you're asking people to act on "feelings". That's how you get things like the Cultural Revolution, which saw communities destroy themselves over ideological purity tests. Oh, you bought yourself a kind-of nice car? Bourgeoisie scum!
What we need is systemic change, one that makes accumulating 19,000 houses unprofitable. Georgism is one potential solution to the problem of housing speculation, without resorting to randomly locking up people that "have too many houses". [1]
Mayors usually do not have that kind of power. There is almost always a city council, akin to a board of directors and CEO, or a congress and president/governor, etc.
As noted in the article, one of the three is publicly traded (Invitation Homes, NYSE: INVH), so you can invest easily if you think they're raking it in. (Annualized return over past 5 years was around 8.3% capital gains plus about 1.5%-3% dividend yield.)
There's nothing inherently wrong with a company owning property.
The problems come when they own a statistically significant percentage of the market. They gain unfair price controls, have unparalleled market data, higher control over agents. All the normal things you get with monopolies.
The resource type matters too. These companies aren't building extra homes to let, they're taking over their competition, vacuuming up stock as fast as they can.
People who need housing are harmed. Stronger controls around housing investment is the problem. People will say "build more" but aren't mindful that we're 15-20 years behind building housing, and it'll take years, if not a decade, to catch back up to make housing affordable through increasing supply. Capital can always move faster than the physical world, hence the need for capital controls.
How are people who need housing harmed by renting the housing?
My best possible understanding is that it helps people that need housing. In particular, these are single family homes, which usually require a 20% down payment in order to have access, unless somebody rents them out. The best schools and public amenities are hidden behind that 20% down payment, excluding those with less wealth. Those with more wealth are still able to rent if they want to, but this option to rent opens up housing to a lot more.
Now, if the only people that you care about are those that can afford a 20% down payment, and you want to maximize their ability to exclude people, I could see how this might "hurt" them, if they will only consider housing when there are not renters. But that's an odd definition of "people."
Housing that is owned by corporations have no price controls. They will charge what the market will bear [1] [2] [3]. Rent increases can and do outpace income increases. Housing owned by corporations is housing that can't be owned by homeowners; when owned by homeowners, they are insulated from rental price increases due to a fixed mortgage.
Your 20% down payment assumption ignore 3-5% down FHA mortgages, accessible to anyone who can fog a mirror (based on their underwriting guidelines). But no mortgage is obtainable if your can't meet the debt to income requirement [4], which most can't because the price of real estate has accelerated so far beyond what wages will support.
Certainly, not everyone wants to be a homeowner. But if you wish to a remain a renter, there is nothing preventing your rent payment from going up until unaffordable, and you end up homeless [5].
> Homelessness in America spiked last year, reaching a record high, according to an annual count that provides a snapshot of one night in January. The report, released today by the department of Housing and Urban development, found more than 650,000 people were living in shelters or outside in tents or cars. That's up a whopping 12% from the year before.
> To advocates, it hardly comes as a surprise.
> "We simply don't have enough homes that people can afford," says Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. "When you combine rapidly rising rent, that it just costs more per month for people to get into a place and keep a place, you get this vicious game of musical chairs."
(was a contract mortgage underwriter for a brief stint a lifetime ago, still very familiar with underwriting guidelines [Fannie, Freddie, FHA, USDA, VA] from a residential mortgage perspective, yet another tool to solve problems with when possible)
> Housing that is owned by corporations have no price controls. They will charge what the market will bear
That has nothing to do with corporate ownership, that is all housing in the US except for the tiny tiny fraction of deed-restricted LIHTC financed means-tested housing and the minuscule amount of public housing left in the US. Corporations can own deed-restricted means-tested price controlled housing, but that's not SFH.
So there's zero change in profit seeking when corporations own homes versus anybody else owning homes. The entire real estate industry focuses on maximizing property values. Homeowners sell based on maximum price, there are zero price controls on any of it. Plus, primary residences get capital gains tax exemptions that corporations do not, further incentivizing homeowners to profit even more than corporations.
> Housing owned by corporations is housing that can't be owned by homeowners.
I think this makes it clear, you only consider the homeowners the "people" and view corporations as competitors in the housing market. I think we should have a broader view and consider the interests of renters too, as full people.
Those 3.5% down payment mortgages have additional mortgage insurance payments that are outrageous and drive up the mortgage price considerably.
I think we just fundamentally disagree; I don't believe institutional ownership of some classes of residential real estate should exist and there should be rent control when needed, when supply simply will never meet demand. The evidence in my citations above demonstrate why. Housing > profits, it's really that simple. Institutional investors can find another asset class for exposure.
Every single home owner is an investor, and often it is there primary asset, that they put all their effort into maximizing financially, as much as possible.
We do fundamentally disagree, I do not view homeowner profits as more virtuous than corporate profits, and in fact corporate profits will be less than resident homeowner profits, due to tax incentives.
Housing is more important than profits, but corporate owned single family homes actually result in less profit than the current homeowner-run system.
Do you support rent control? You're making the argument the fight is between homeowners and renters, but you're not addressing landlord profiteering. How will you ensure rent is affordable for renters (as I've shown, it clear isn't for 30-50% of Americans) if increasing supply does not increase affordability?
This is a completely unrelated issue, but I do support rent control. Rents were completely unaffordable before the corporate story entered the picture, and at only 11% of the SFH market, it's not the main issue, and perhaps most importantly, nobody ever complained about corporate ownership of apartment buildings. Rents are completely unaffordable even in places that have rent control. The only affordability measure that works is providing enough housing to meet people's desire to live in a place.
I ask you, what are homeowners' profits virtuous but corporate profits not? The corporate ownership of SFH is a sign that there are huge profits in owning homes, not the cause of it.
Homeowners should be taxed on their primary residence gains just as corporations should be. I am fully in favor of removing the primary residence tax exemption.
We can agree on this! Would you be in favor of changing the system such that homeownership is no longer such a profitable endeavor, where it leads to unaffordability for future generations? This is the core of the problem in my view, and corporate ownership is a way of distracting people from taking political action on the core problem confronting our housing situation.
Since they're mostly not public, I'd say probably very few.
From TFA:
> To make things even more complex, many of these large companies are not traded publicly on the stock market, meaning their total number of holdings is not easily available to the public. Because Invitation Homes is publicly traded
Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH) is part of S&P500, so I'd say very many (owning a tiny share). Ownership of INVH is overwhelmingly institutional (investment/mutual/retirement funds): https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INVH/holders
The estimate in this study is that three different companies own a combined 19,000 housing units in the "five county" metro Atlanta area.
I realize these aren't 1:1 comparisons, but they are the best I can find. That suggests each company probably owns less than 0.5% of the area housing supply.
Open to other estimates, but think they would be pretty close to mine.
https://documents.atlantaregional.com/Land%20Use/Reviews/ID4...