re: WSJ: Wall Street Has Spent Billions Buying Homes. A Crackdown Is Looming.

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What about the guy that owns 10,20, or 30 rentals?

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I think you have to let these people continue to operate as a local business. There's nothing inherently wrong with rentals or landlords or even large rental management companies. It's when it becomes "corporatized" on a large, integrated scale that creates the problem. Keep things on a Mom and Pop level instead of transitioning to the Walmart/Home Depot system.

And there's a practical aspect to this too. You rent a home that is owned by a state registered LLC, which in turn is owned by a REIT from out of state, which in turn is owned by a Wall St hedge fund incorporated in Delaware, which is in turn owned by some publicly traded finance company. What are you going to do, call up some securities manager at Blackrock and demand someone fix or replace your crappy HVAC unit? I mean slumlords suck but at least you know who they are and where to find them. Good luck fighting Wall St on some landlord-tennant dispute.

Not to mention these institutional investors also make money by leveraging, securitizing and generally moving paper around amongst themselves to fatten margins or inflate profits. We saw this in the housing crisis back in 2008-2010. Some poor schmuck is sacrificing and suffering to pay his inflated rent every month and then he gets a foreclosure notice and he finds out the company he wrote that check to every month actually transfered the mortgage three times to other institutions who layered nine layers of shite into one layer of gold to create fraudulent security instruments or bonds.

The bottom line is don't frick with housing. It's too integral to the American Dream and the social and financial welfare of our citizenry.