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

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"institutions" own an extremely tiny portion of the US housing market.

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I have seen this talking point brought up constantly. It is disingenuous at best as it ignores the recent trends.

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An estimated 39 percent of rental housing units in the United States are single-family dwellings. Because larger households tend to prefer the size of single-family homes, roughly 41 percent of the renter population lives in single- family homes. In recent years, institutional and other large investors have been actively expanding their share of the single-family rental market. Between 2011 and 2017, these investors purchased more than 200,000 single-family homes at a total cost of $36 billion. Investor purchases surged again during the COVID-19 pandemic: in the first quarter of 2022, investor purchases of single- family homes averaged 28 percent per month, compared with 19 percent the previous year and the average of 16 per- cent between 2017 and 2019. This rate is much higher in certain areas of the country, reaching up to 67 percent in Lincoln County, Mississippi; 63 percent in Van Buren County, Iowa; and 52 per- cent in Tarrant County, Texas, in 2021. Large portfolio investors (those holding more than 100 properties) drove this growth. According to CoreLogic, institutional investors purchased 3 percent of homes sold in 2021, three times their typical share in prior years. Research by MetLife Investment Management suggests that, as of August 2022, institutions owned approximately 700,000 single- family rental homes.

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LINK


There is a clear uptick in the homes being bought by institutional investors and it's growing.