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PE didn’t kill housing. Private equity owns 2-3% of homes.
by dadrian 9mo ago
PE didn’t kill housing. Private equity owns 2-3% of homes.
- postpawl 9mo agoThe national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too. Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
- osiris970 9mo agoTime to build!
- postpawl 9mo agoBuilding helps, but without addressing who gets to buy the new stock, you're potentially just building inventory for PE portfolios.
- osiris970 9mo agoI don't generally agree, i think they should be able to buy them as well. We can't limit how many homes people own, how do you rent then? What do we classify as "too much" house ownership? 10?100?1000?
- postpawl 9mo agoA mom and pop landlord with 5 rentals doesn't have pricing power. A firm owning 1 in 5 homes in a neighborhood does. That's why antitrust thresholds exist in other industries.
- osiris970 9mo agoThat's fair, we aren't anywhere close to that though right? From research I saw, investors usually push prices down. Tangent but corporate landlords in my experience are so much better than mom and pops.
- pennomi 9mo agoWe absolutely CAN limit how many homes people are allowed to own. Whether or not we SHOULD is the argument here.
- mothballed 9mo agoOwner-builder rather than for sale. By doing that, I was able to opt out of building codes, inspections, licensing, any building plans, and most the other horse shit that makes it so expensive. Depends on where you live, but if you build for yourself it's a non-commercial activity which can drop off a lot of red tape. Cost me only ~60k to build a house last year by doing everything myself. I did have to sign an affidavit promising not to sell it in X time to get the county to issue a permit like that.
- postpawl 9mo agoMost people can't build their own home (time, skills, land access, upfront capital for materials). It's like responding to “healthcare is too expensive” with “I just treated my own broken arm”.
- mothballed 9mo agoMost people can actually; for awhile most families did. The thing stopping them is largely the state. I got my land for "a song" post COVID when home prices were already insane. Near lots of jobs too. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to build it for about 1/4 the cost of what anything around me costs. It did cost me 60k, but for 30k (the price of a newish car, which you see even in many section 8 / welfare areas, so accessible even sometimes to the 'lower' class) you could easily finish out a 200 sq ft shed with a plumbed haul water cistern, minimal solar, a wood stove, and a simple waste treatment system. Then as you have more money, expand. You don't even have to have all the money at one time; many families in latin america or SEA just buy blocks as money allows and slowly build over time (masonry construction more forgiving of this). I've even found land for <100k in places like San Francisco that is enough to drop a shipping container on, but of course the fascists won't let you, better to be homeless and shit hepatitis into the street than have an unpermitted shipping container and bury some 50 gallon drums and drain field DIY septic system.
- osiris970 9mo agoThat's sick, any resources you can point to?
- pembrook 9mo agoOwning 1 in 9 "rental" homes means they own less than 1% of all homes. You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one. PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
- senordevnyc 9mo agoOK, well are the economics in those markets worse than similar markets with lower levels of PE ownership of homes? Is there a correlation there that we can see in the data? Because otherwise stats from a couple moderate sized cities doesn’t seem that relevant to the nation as a whole.
- postpawl 9mo agoThe St Louis fed did a study about this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2020/2020-047.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2020/2020-04... “We find that investors' purchases increase the price-to-income ratio, especially in the bottom price-tier”
- happyopossum 9mo agoIn the past few years I’ve been involved in 7 real estate transactions in California, and haven’t seen a single “all cash offer from investors” on any of them. I hear this rhetoric a lot, but it’s almost always from people who have never actually been involved in selling a home, or are shopping for a home way out of their price range and were going to get outbid anyway.
- postpawl 9mo agoThat's surprising given the data. Were these transactions recent? Investors focus on entry-level properties, so if you're buying above that tier you'd see less competition. But California overall has high investor activity: “In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.” https://www.dailynews.com/2025/09/11/36-of-california-homebuyers-were-investors-in-2025s-first-half/ https://www.dailynews.com/2025/09/11/36-of-california-homebu...
- taurath 9mo agoWonder what the % of houses are sold that aren't for the owners primary residence. Also what % in cash.