Comment by chucksta
2 days ago
Depends where you are
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow...
|“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
2 days ago
Depends where you are
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow...
|“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
"Corporations" is meaningless in this context. If you want to own a rental home in the US, you should set up an LLC, both for liability reasons and because it makes it easier to deal with taxes and expenses.
In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy / build one. Commercial real estate too.
If you click around your neighborhood, a lot of single-family homes are owned by living trusts and "Bob & Kate" LLCs, but that doesn't mean there's any hedge fund money involved.
Just to reinforce this, the last place I lived in was owned by a corporation...of one man, who lived a town away in a modest house and worked as a paper pusher by day.
The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes"
Metro Atlanta has a population of 6 mil, say 2/3 live in detached homes with 2 persons per home. So that's 38,000 out of 2 mil homes, so about 2%
There are well over a million homes in the metro Atlanta area. If the top three owners have less than 4% of a market, need if they act in a completely coordinated manner they have approximately zero market power.
7 replies →
> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse.
I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.
The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.
no offence but this kind of makes you part of the problem
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That's not really meaningless though. You just explained in more detail some attributes of corporations, many of which are precisely the things many people are criticizing when they criticize the fact that corporations own lots of housing. Of course we all know that there are still humans behind the corporations.
I've been told that, for privacy reasons, you should even buy your own home under an LLC as well
Depends on how unique your legal name is. Buying your own home as an individual creates a public record with your address and your name. This gets ingested by lots of people search websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ (which I have used). But if your legal name is really common, it would be harder for anyone else to deduce which one is actually you.
3 replies →
Significantly complicates getting a mortgage though
This suggests that a single-family home is generally a bad investment. Maybe not if you're living in the house yourself (no renter-landlord inefficiency), but still idk. Could make more sense in certain areas where all the value is in the land.
It's segmented. If you don't have a whole lot of capital but want to invest in real estate, you buy a rental home or two.
If you do have a lot of capital ($100M+), you don't, because you can spend that money to build or buy an apartment complex that gives you something like 5x as many tenants per dollar spent. And is cheaper to maintain in the long haul.
Indeed. This was discussed about a month ago. My prior comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208561
LLC may be a type of corporation but when people complain about corporations buying up homes they really mean C-corps, not LLCs owned by Uncle Bob who likes to flip houses.
Right, and when people share stats such as "60% of homes are owned by corporations", they're either clueless or are trying to deliberately muddy the waters.
But is that Big Money Private Equity or "took a class from that Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who said we should create a company and invest in real estate" corporation?
The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes" Home many rich dads do you know with 12,500 homes?
Having personal experience here, I'll take the company owning 10,000 homes over the rich dad any day. That rich dad is desperate, incompetent, and breaks tenant law all the time, ie chaotic evil. The corporation is lawful evil instead which can at least be planned for.
It is possible that the article has changed, but that is not in the article that I see right now, which is this: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-will-ban-large-instituti...
Looking at Google, I see this press release for a 2024 study says that "3 companies own nearly 19,000 metro Atlanta homes" across 190 LLC shell companies: https://news.gsu.edu/2024/02/26/researchers-find-three-compa... (1). But even so, that 19,000 represented 11% of the single-family rental market in the Atlanta metro area, meaning that even if it's 38,000 then we're talking 1 in 5 of the rental homes available in Atlanta, which the article says has many more large investor owned homes than anywhere else in the US- an expert is quoted as saying that it has more than the next 2-3 cities combined for large investors. If that 38,000 is correct (and I only have your quote for that number) then more than 10% of all large investor-owned homes across the country are in the Atlanta metro area, since the Reuters article that this gives large investors (more than 1k homes) a total of 345k rental single-family homes across the US as of 2Q 2025. A 2022 GAO study found that institutional investors owned about 3% of all rental single-family homes across the US.
"Rich Dad" style investors simply own the vast majority of rental single-family homes across the US. According to the bar chart in the Reuters article, investors who own 1-5 single family houses available for rent (the classic dentist who went to a "Make Money in Real Estate" seminar) own 87% of the national market. Looking at the GSU press release, they claim Atlanta is an unusually attractive market for large investors- they particularly call out the lack of tenant protections- and that means that it has concentrated the activity, and it is still not particularly large a part of the market. Enough to dominate some neighborhoods of Atlanta, probably. But the solution is not some nationwide ban by executive order that can't possibly be constitutional, but for Georgia to get better tenant protections so that institutional investors aren't as attracted to the market.
1: I'm going to presume that the 38,000 is from later work finding more shell companies. I also can't read the underlying research article because I am unwilling to pay absurd journal fees.
Is there a difference?
Only one of them will be affected by the proposed law.
Both are bad.
Many people register houses they purchase in LLCs for privacy protection purposes
"Clark" is an arbitrary commenter.
The actual data provided was:
> For example, corporate landlords own more than 12,000 homes in Paulding and Henry County, accounting for 11.2% and 9.9% of all single-family homes in the counties.