Comment by runjake
2 days ago
> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.
I'm pretty naive to the issue, but awhile back I took a look at property records for my neighborhood. In fact, equity firms, including BlackRock, were buying up a bunch of houses in my neighborhood.
A tiny datapoint, I know.
Edit: It might've been Blackstone. It's been about a year since I looked it up.
Edit 2: Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?
> Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?
I never went far enough to get all the details back when I was considering a move, but my impression is a lot of these "buy your home and close fast" corporate purchasers were offering just enough to make the speed and ability to not have to make a lot of major improvements worth the lost money from selling on the market. Then they do just enough work to clean up any "show stopper" problems and re-sell at market prices.
So (very simplified) if you have a home that might sell for 200k on the market if you put 10k of work into it, but you need to move in a few months, and you need to pay off 100k on the loan, the company offers you something like 180k. You walk away with 80k (instead of 90k) in your pocket and avoid the various real estate agent fees and the need to do any of the fix up work or deal with trying to sell and move at the same time. The company puts the $10k of work into it and sells for the 200k, pocketing the $10k you gave up.
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