What happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood

Shameless apologia for private equity vultures buying up all the houses, what a terrible article. "Oh but renting costs less so it makes your neighborhood more diverse with more lower-income residents!" Yeah and renting also ensures you stay low-income forever by never getting the opportunity to build any equity. Real 'you'll own nothing and you'll be happy' energy

The opening paragraph is also a laugh. "Daniel Erb became a corporate landlord kind of by accident." Yeah he was an investment banker who decided he wanted to invest in real estate so he decided to call his cousin at BlackRock- woopsie! what a weird accident!

Private equity doesn't own a lot of houses. For example, in California large landlords (including private equity but also traditional landlord companies) own 1.9% of houses, small landlords (under 10 houses) own about 20% of houses, and individuals own the rest.

And which way is it trending? Massively upwards, as per the article. I've been getting constant texts for years from private equity parasites trying to buy my house, everyone who owns one does. It won't take long for that 2% to become 5% and then 10% and onwards if nothing is done about it.

Are you sure those texts are from private equity?

I've dabbled with RE investments and hang out with those clubs. It's highly likely the origin of those mailings/texts is from an average person like you and me (most of whom have a full time job earning less than most SW engineers). They are doing RE as a side business, and are paying a service to send out those mailers/texts.

They're looking for distressed homeowners (e.g. people who are about to lose the house due to unpaid property taxes, etc).

They've been doing this for decades, but the easier availability of data due to the Internet, as well as the growth of online services, has made it much more accessible to the average Joe. It requires very little capital to send out those mailers/texts.

If you're getting more of these now than 20 years ago, it's because RE investing has become a lot more democratized/accessible.