I have been concerned about this trend in real estate – buying up of homes by corporations, hedge funds, institutional investors, which crowds out regular homeowners.
As someone that owns 15 single-family rentals…I struggle with this one myself. I am in the camp that there is no better asset class for building wealth than real estate, especially on the taxable investment side. We started accumulating properties in early 2000s and expanded greatly during the GFC. So at that time…it was investors that were solving the problem of banks unloading all their non-performing real estate. It wasn’t the retail buyers coming to the rescue. On the supply side…we have never recovered from that event and are millions of units short by all accounts.
We plan to start disposing of one or two properties each year and will do our best to make sure they end up in the hands of retail owners.
Don’t beat people or yourselves up. Someone will buy the homes.
It probably less to do with who is buying and more with inflation aka dollar devaluation since the ‘70’s (endless borrowing from/printing by private Fed)