Comment by CPLX
2 days ago
This is absolutely, violently, incorrect.
Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.
Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem.
Building more housing is the opposite of a problem.
It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal.
In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.
The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.
We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.
Do you have any source? Googling it tells me otherwise.
Here's a few examples:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi... https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corpora...
It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.