There are many problems inthe modern housing market, but the biggest one forAmericans tends to be the price. Prices rose 40% from thestart of the pandemic. In the final half of 2022,hetypical US home sold for a record shattering $468,000. That's unaffordable formost Americans, leaving them to rent. The housing costs arecompletely out of line with.
Wages. Some members of Congressbelieve Wall Street is a part of the problem. What's outrageous is yourtax dollars are helping Wall Street buy up single familyhomes. You're subsidizing WallStreet. Massive private equity firmslike Blackstone and Pretium Partners have backed arelatively new breed of homeowner, the corporation.
This growing industry buysor builds single family homes and then rents themout. We hear from communityorganizers that are doorknocking in certainneighborhoods and are just surprised by how many ofthe homes on a particular block will be owned by acorporate landlord. Industry advocates saycorporate landlords play a critical role in addressingthe nationwide housing crisis.
What we have in housing inthe United States is a chronic shortage since thefinancial. Crisis. And so the questionreally is how do we fill that gap? Is the answerincentivizing new housing development, new housinginvestment, new market participation? What's behind the rise ofcorporate landlords and how, if at all, will thegovernment regulate them? As of 2023, corporatelandlords only command a.
Small portion of the rentalhousing in this country. The vast majority of allrental units, including apartments, are owned byindividual, small time investors. But there'sgrowing focus on single family homes. Institutions. Largecompanies only account for about 1% of all the rentalhousing in the United States, and only about 2%of the single family rental housing.
There's a small but mightygroup of companies that lead the industry. So Pretium is the parentcompany for a company called Progress Residential thatowns about 90,000 homes. They were started by DonMullen, who came out of Goldman Sachs MortgageGroup. Invitation Homes wasstarted by Blackstone, but Blackstone sold theirposition a long time ago. They own about 80,000homes.
American homes for rent,which was started by Wayne Hughes. They own about60,000 homes. There's a company calledTricon Residential that's out of Canada. And then there's one calledAmherst. Those are the big five. In recent years, corporatelandlords have been most active in the Sunbelt. In 2021, corporationsbought 28% of all the homes.
Sold in Texas. That figure was 19% inGeorgia and 16% in Florida. Companies like Pretium andBlackstone target these markets. Blackstone inparticular, has held large stakes in several companiesthat dominate the region. Rent hikes for singlefamily homes in this region have outpaced other partsof the country since the onset of the pandemic. Rents for a two beddetached home increased.
About 43%. In Phoenix, they're up 44%in Tampa and 35% in Atlanta. That's compared to 24%nationwide. Experts say that many ofthe properties bought up by institutional groups werepreviously owned by people who were destabilized inrecent recessions. After the pandemic, peoplesaw the opportunity to go into these lower incomeneighborhoods, working class neighborhoods, buy up thesehouses and in communities.
That the working class canafford. And they're holding thesehouses often for years, taking them off the market,making it even harder for young people and workingclass families to own a house. Companies like Blackstonemake serious money from these investments. For example, the company'sreal Estate Income Trust delivered an 8.4% return oninvestment in 2022.
This in a year when thewider stock market declined nearly 20%. Part of the problem withprivate equity involved in housing is that they're init for the short term. Their goal is to take acompany, increase cash flow in order, then to sell itor to take it public, which they did in the case ofinvitation homes. Unlike many smallerlandlords who still are looking to have a profit,maybe in it more for the.
Long term and see it as along term investment are more concerned in terms ofstability and concerned in terms of satisfied tenantsand wanting there to be less turnover. With privateequity, it's really about kind of maximizing theshort term returns. In particular, real estatefunds issued by private equity groups can be auseful hedge against inflation, boosting theirpopularity. Analysts write that by2030, institutions may own.
7.6 million single familyrental homes. That could be more than 40%of the market. But that's a big if. Many real estate expertssay the main solution to the problematic housing marketis to build fast. In the late seventies andearly eighties, the United States routinely generatedbetween three and 400,000 starter homes a year. In 2020, we generated65,000.
So we have a situation nowwhere we're trying to catch up, but we haven't quitegotten there. 15 years ago, lots of homeswere coming onto the market. As Wall Street's riskylending led to a crash in the late 2000s, scores ofpeople lost their homes. Roughly 8 million mortgageswent into foreclosure between 2007 and 2016. Institutional investorsstepped in buying up homes that were on sale.
A lot bigger. Investorsstarted to get into the rental game. They startedbuying up thousands of these distressed properties. And actually they reallyhelped to put a floor on home prices because homeprices were crashing so hard. There was a decision tosubsidize some of these private equity firms to gointo the housing market. You could argue that thatwas needed because the.
Market had been sosuppressed. This crash led to the birthof the single family rental industry. So I had a friend of minewho was very well connected. He took me all aroundWashington, D.C., and I just shared what was going on. And then out of that, I metwith somebody at HUD whose idea was like, Why are wegoing to foreclose on all these people and try andcreate huge losses for HUD,.
The Housing and UrbanDevelopment, and then provide all sorts of rentalassistance to these people who are going to need it? Why don't we just basicallykeep them in the house, restructure it, maybe say,okay, you're a renter now, not a homeowner, butcausing far less distress. You started to see theemergence of professional management in the singlefamily rental home space. I mean, it was needed maybefor a couple of years, not.
For a decade, where it'slining the pockets of people now on Wall Street. Still, many people say thatthe institutional investors are providing a qualityproduct to relatively high income individuals. They figured out prettyearly on, like it's pretty hard to be profitable whenyou're focusing on people who are missing paymentsall the time and living in 70 year old homes that needa lot of CapEx.
So the Wall Street grouphas focused on newer homes and higher paying higherincome tenants who are more discretionary renters, notnot out of necessity because that's been a better profitmodel for them. Other experts point out thatgiven the supply constraints, there aren'tmany other options for people on the market. It's almost a captivemarket, particularly in terms of with single familyrentals.
They've been very explicitabout how people are shut out of the the home buyingmarket and are going to be perpetual renters. Renting or buying your homeis one of the most consequential financialdecisions an individual will make. Home ownership is the mainway in this country that people build wealth. And while in some ways itmay not look very different.
Whether somebody is rentingor owning a home. Financially, it's verysignificant both for that individual family and forcommunities, whether or not they do own the home. That said… Not everyone wants to be ahomeowner. They want to be able torent for a little while, potentially move withinthat neighborhood or move to another state. Moving andflexibility has become a.
Premium to most consumers,so renting is not considered less than buying. It's actually favored by alot more consumers. Some of this can be observedin this chart. It shows the so called homeownership premium. The time periods depictedin blue show when renting would be a better deal. That includes most of 2021and the periods marked red. Owning was a better dealthat includes many of the.
Years following the GreatRecession. The changes in the homeownership premium are driven by home prices and mortgagerates. Usually the cost to be anowner are a couple hundred dollars a month higher,especially if you start throwing in maintenance andother things. That's even higher thanthat. Lots of potential buyers maybe waiting for a wider correction in the housing market.
Over the last 40 years. The housing cost for thetypical home in America compared to the income ofthe typical home buyer has been running 29 to 30%. Whether you look at themedian or the average, it has blown out to 42% rightnow. We have a prettysignificant home price decline forecast coming. What I've seen, anythingfrom really not falling at.
All this year to droppingback ten, 15%. Now, the thing that isdifferent this time around than during the GreatRecession is that supply and demand issue, there's stillnot enough supply and that's going to keep pricesinflated. Some experts believe thebest way out of this problem is not to limit corporatelandlords, but rather to do whatever it takes to buildmore housing. Some of these big REIT's,these landlords are actually.
Building homes. They'readding to the supply that we desperately need. Experts believe this trendcould help, but it needs far more time to prove itsvalue. We can only find 909actively selling Build to rent communities, about 10%of the rental home construction in the countryright now. But 26% of renters rent asingle family home. So it's not even keeping upwith the pace of rental.
Demand for single familyversus apartment. Some members of Congressbelieve limiting corporate activity in the housingsector is a good first step. Wall Street is going to buyup a single family home and it's vacant for a couple ofyears. We're going to tax it,forcing these firms to sell that back into the market. What we're saying is don'thave private equity buying up single family homes.
That's going to mean thereare more single family homes on the market. With a split Congress, itwould take significant bipartisan efforts to pass. There are some bills inCongress which want to limit the amount of homes thatinvestors can own, and they're unlikely to getthrough because they're pretty drastic. They'retelling investors that they're going to have toonly be able to own, in one.
Sense, 100 homes or they'regoing to have to pay significant taxes on theothers. Now, these institutionalinvestors own thousands of homes. In a statement, Blackstonetold CNBC that every home they own could go to aresident who hopes to buy the home later. I mean, we think, frankly,that they just own too many. Particularly in terms of inthe single family home.
Industry. I think there areways such as implementing additional taxes on themthat would either generate money for affordablehousing or encourage them to sell off from theirportfolio. And we do support rentcontrol. Just cause eviction. Different conditions interms of the to ensure the habitability of a property. On the ground. A litany ofstates have tried to provide.
Direct relief to tenantsthrough policies like rent control. Groups backed byBlackstone have fought back hard. In 2018, the companyspent about $7 million to oppose rent control forsingle family homes in California, according toresearchers at University of California at Berkeley. In a statement to CNBC, aBlackstone spokesperson said the proposition would haveexacerbated the state's housing crisis.
At the same time, theprivate equity group has not made meaningful investmentsin building new single family homes. There's got to be a bit ofdistress there, but long term, this is the firstinning.
On memoir of they’re “Capitalists”
must be illegal to scoop up all of the homes on hand.
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