How private equity is changing housing

Wait, you're not answering his question. "Institutional investors" rent out houses at a scale individual owners can't, and have more resources to maintain those properties and respond to renter complaints. Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?

>Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?

Is there a good example of this?

Every corporation I've rented from have all fought me tooth and nail when I needed maintenance and did basically everything possible to ignore any and all complaints (because it costs them money, obviously). I have had to have a lawyer send a letter on my behalf more than once.

But that's just my experience, which has jaded me. Perhaps you can show me a non-hypothetical example of the other side and open my eyes up a bit? Any countries, laws, specific corporations which demonstrate a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders I should look at?

It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners!

Anyways, I was just calling out that your logic didn't appear to hold. The right response to the comment that roots this subthread is "institutional landlords are not generally a thing". Again: the median number of properties a California corporate landlord lets out is 1.

>your logic

I didn't write any other comment here :)

But, anyways:

>It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners!

My experience has been different than yours, in that case!

Must be. In particular: the only landlord I ever got a security deposit back from automatically was a corporate landlord.

More broadly: if your concern is that the landlord isn't going to fix the furnace or whatever, you can address that without distorting the market just by creating causes of action, penalties, and fix-and-deduct ordinances to shift incentives.

Banning corporate landlords reduces the supply of housing (larger institutional investors are the primary builders of dense multifamily), and privileges individual owner/landlords who do not have a better track record or better incentives or better resources.

Right. I'm not advocating for a banning of corporate landlords. I just wanted to look at the regulations/ordinances/etc. of a "carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders" to take some inspiration from, and perhaps advocate for some of the sensible rules in my area. I know you participate in your local politics, and have a different viewpoint than mine, so I thought I'd ask.

Fair enough! Hard for me to answer, because my priors are that non-corporate landlords are generally worse than institutional landlords, if only because the structural incentives favor scale.

Not sure the median makes sense for this argument. Say 51% of corporate landlords let out 1 property, and 49% let out 100 - most people will live in a property owned by the 49%. The absolute number of landlords in the 51% would be mostly meaningless.