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!

The fact that most people can only get exposure to the housing market by taking a massive loan to perform a leveraged buy-in, at which point a single asset forms the bulk of their capital portfolio, is not a good way to build generational wealth, and it certainly shouldn’t be the only way to a middle class life.

It’s honestly possible that people would be better off putting their money into a diversified investment fund that includes a spread portfolio of housing among other assets, so they can benefit from that growth. If your 401K includes Blackrock assets, you’re still benefitting from overall housing market growth, without that being tied up in also being the building you live in.

The big win buying a house historically represents – for those for whom it works out – is of course that you can buy a house with borrowed money on a fixed rate, pay off the loan over 30 years, and pocket the appreciation in the asset over the loan value. That’s an amazing deal if you’re lucky enough to buy and sell the right house at the right time and get your loan at the right interest rate. But it definitely doesn’t work out for everyone.

I agree that the 'housing as an investment' situation is awful but what are the prospects, realistically, for someone looking for a home right now? If it's a choice between renting or paying off a mortgage then to me it's a no brainer to go for the loan if you can get one on reasonable terms. Otherwise you're just throwing money away on rent, you'll never see those rent payments again. And that's what I don't want to see, private equity home ownership reaching a point where more and more people have no choice but to rent. Whatever the solution is to the housing crisis (probably building more homes, duh), I don't think it's relinquishing ownership to wall street and becoming a society of renters

And yes I know they don't own that many houses relatively speaking, right now, but I personally don't see any upside to allowing the practice at all.