Some rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever. These rich and the corporations they run have spent recent years buying up homes for sale and turning their new purchases into rental properties.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases. The impact of this deep-pocket dabbling in the sale of middle-class housing? Corporate landlords turn out to be more likely, a Vox analysis points out, to evict tenants, raise rents, and dodge needed repairs and maintenance.
Apologist for the richest among us are claiming that critics of this deep-pocket interest in middle-class housing are making a mountain out of an investment molehill. They point out, for instance, that private-equity firms and other “institutional investors” drove less than 3 percent of all home sales in 2021 and 2022.
But that low national percentage, note housing experts like Cincinnati’s Laura Brunner, can obscure what’s happening in many actual local neighborhoods. Private-equity dollars can routinely buy up “50 percent of the houses on a single street.”
Other deep-pocketed movers and shakers, meanwhile, are taking different routes to exploiting America’s inadequate supply of affordable housing. Just how inadequate? In the decade that ended in 2022, Realtor.com reported last March, the nation ended up with “a shortfall of 6.5 million single-family homes.” The investor response to that shortfall? An explosion of “residential transition loans.”
These loans go to America’s growing army of house “flippers,” local speculators of various sorts who buy up older homes from families that can’t afford to make badly needed upgrades and repairs. The loans come at a “relatively high interest rate,” as much as 10 percent annually, notes Barron’s.
Financial industry outfits like 1Sharpe Capital, a subsidiary of the Blackstone private-equity colossus, package these high-interest notes into investment funds that offer millionaires returns that can average over three percentage points more than investments in U.S. Treasury funds.
The sharpies at 1Sharpe Capital, for their role in all this, reap an annual management fee of 0.5 percent and a 20-percent “performance fee” if they deliver investment fund returns that run 1.3 percent or more above the three-month Treasury index.
These ample fees ultimately make up only a tiny share of the income that annually pours into the Blackstone private-equity pool. But every little bit helps. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, we learned this past August, “received a total adjusted compensation package of $253.1 million in 2022.”
Source: inequality.org
