It's not that simple - the problem is that those institutions are market makers. They are a tiny portion of the market, but a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices, because their properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives that you don't normally want operating in the arena of housing.

The things that they do have massively outsized downstream impact contrasted against their relatively tiny overall participation in the market, and they can afford to behave in ways that manipulate the behavior of the majority.

If you can decouple them from the housing markets, you also decouple the interests of the donor class, and you allow for policy that doesn't maximize the cost of real estate over the interests of the majority of the population.

Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.

I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate.

If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the entire cost of the property to a bank in the form of interest payments.

Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.

The real contention is two fold: investors are collectively pricing out non-investors that would presumably actually live in the home they purchased, and among investors, institutional investors are both positioned to ignore market pressures and constitute too large a portion of the market, restricting even rental availability and affordability of the homes.

The reason institutional investors are blamed is that they usually have significant holdings elsewhere, and demonstrably will just wait out a market, taking loses they write off against their other businesses in the meantime, rather than actually participating in it. That ability to wait out the market on a finite resource rather than participating is usually otherwise only seen during antitrust market activities. The fact that many cities are considering adding significant vacancy taxes on properties, citing specifically this behavior as a driving factor, is pretty damning.

Additionally, it's not necessary for these institutional investors that are ignoring the market pressures to own a majority, or even that large of a share. Any portion they own and ignore the market for is effectively just removed from the market entirely and reduces the remaining pool of what's available. And the second-order effect is an overall damping of market responsiveness since they are simply refusing to respond to the demand half of supply and demand. I don't have the models to run the math myself, but it should theoretically be possible to calculate how much their involvement without participation impacts the prices as a relation to market share, and I'll bet it's a nonlinear result with a steep curve at even low volumes.

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.

> 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?

Where I live, in the fastest growing big city in the US, it is absolutely commercial investment firms buying up all the homes. I used to get calls several times a week from these guys want to buy my house in cash. I stopped taking their calls and now it has slowed to only a few calls per month.

The last call I took, last year, they were ready to buy my house in cash at market value without looking at the property.

The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are rentals, and there are thousands of houses in my neighborhood under the same HOA.

> But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties.

Maybe they should clamp down on that as well, especially individuals who are only purchasing SFH in residential neighborhoods as a way to park their overseas cash.

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.

This is a common trope.

"It's not big conglomerates that buy and hodl the homes where families are supposed to live, its mom and pop investors so please be nice."

Having a home is not something to speculate with or leave it to the supposed "market forces".

Housing projects and regulation is what this country needs, yesterday.

A better example than Blackrock is Arrived:

"The Arrived team is cracked, and I love the audacity of their vision: a stock market for real estate," said Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, in a release. "I'm betting on them to democratize and digitize access to America's $50 trillion in residential real estate." [0]

Should housing be a “$50 trillion” market for fractional ownership, bundled with its own secondary/speculative market to turn around and flip like penny stocks?

Lovely knowing I can have “access” to that platform and own a 0.004% share in a house someone somewhere out there lives in (rents). While I’ll probably never own a house again.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/13/arrived-launches-trading...

I can only provide anecdotal information. In my HOA community we had to make a rule that you need to live in your home for two years before you can rent it. This effectively stopped the companies like Innovation Homes from buying up properties in our neighborhood. Post housing crisis-2015 it was getting pretty bad with the investors purchasing the single family homes. I don’t know if places like Innovation Homes qualifies as “Wall Street” or not.

I thought one of the big problem with Wall Street buying housing inventory is that they were turning them into AirBnbs because that is more profitable (generally) than renting. This pressure takes a lot of units off of the market for normal people to rent or buy and makes holding on to your last house a lot more profitable as a rental. I think if we get rid of these (basically) unregulated hotel exception and forced people who who AirBnb to live in that property as a primary residence 180 days a year, then the inventory could correct.

Obviously, the other factor in home prices is zoning and people who own wanting to keep supply down so their house is guaranteed to appreciate. Affordable housing (just like homelessness) in the US is only a problem because we lack the political will to solve it.

> But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals...

I think the relevant quantity we'd want to look at is what constitutes most of the property being bought-up by investors. Counting investors is going to bias the count towards multitudes of little-guys.

And part of the problem may be people like my cousin, who bought a house without selling the old one, choosing to rent it instead.

> "Resident experience is hurting as a result," said Jeff Holzmann, COO of RREAF Holdings, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm with over $5 billion in assets. "Instead of you calling your landlord to discuss a problem, you're calling a call center that gives you the runaround."

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "Wall Street" buying up all the property and real estate investment firms like RREAF doing the same, or come to that the guy down the street buying a few properties to rent out.

A small company or single investor can buy up a large percentage of local available property and be just as bad a landlord.

https://econofact.org/factbrief/do-private-equity-firms-own-...

> "Large institutional investors, defined as those owning over 100 homes (which includes private equity firms), own 3 percent of the single-family rental stock nationwide according to Brookings. This share is higher in some local markets — in the 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas where these investors are most present, they own 12.4 percent"

I personally believe that its problematic that large institutional investors own 12.4% of single family properties in the 20 main metro areas of the US.

While that’s true, even if “Wall Street” is only holding a few percent of homes, those being released to the markets (and future ones not being purchased) might help.

Corporate entity creation in America is such that I don’t think this will be enforceable (“we don’t buy homes, our Gibraltar office’s subsidiary invested in its CEO’s LLC that bought the home”) but if I’m wrong, it could help somewhat.

It’s binary thinking to assume that just because it isn’t a one step solution it won’t make a meaningful impact. But still, I think it won’t yet hope I’m wrong.

I feel like this article is littered with suspicious statements

Like this one:

> In fact, institutional homebuyers (those who bought 100+ homes in a 12-month period) didn’t even reach 2.5% market share at the peak level in this data line, which goes back to the start of the century.

I don’t know how to evaluate this. I doubt this analysis rolls up subsidiaries. So what does it really mean for an entity to own 100+ units? Is that actually something we care about?

Imo only thing people need to give a shit about is whether a house is being bought to be lived in.

This is meaningless, even with "Wall Street", as you've said. Several companies raise funds, to buy these homes. Institutions the like of Blackrock and REITs invest in these funds, all the time. This isn't new at all, and has been happening for years. It's just been accelerating. Add to that startups like Arrived, and there's simply more pressure on this market then ever before, sadly.

It really depends on the market. The institutional investors are common in the South and Southwest. I think the fact that they exist at all is a problem.

You are correct however that smaller private investors are more common. I live in a small city. Small property management companies from NYC and NJ are pretty commonly buying up 2-4 family houses. I suspect that some of these "small" players aren't small at all, but hiding in a maze of LLCs.

I know a couple of dudes from way back that have leveraged their way to a real estate empire with >2000 homes in the region.

I would be very against individual investors not being allowed to buy property for investment. I think most people can agree that corporations like blackstone/rock shouldn't be manipulating markets. It would be very bad to force blackrock to liquidate its current holdings of 230k homes. It could crater the entire industry and it runs into ex-post-facto issues. Assets need to maintain value or banks will fail.

They do seem to have a significant impact on prices though: https://www.reri.org/research/files/big_ltrs_and_housing_mar...

You're right. It doesn't matter though. People love 'big fixes', the reality of systemic change is hard to present in a 2 minute sound bite or Instagram reel. This is the kind of 'fix' that gets implemented, then when things don't magically improve people will just give up.

I think it depends on the market.

Atlanta specifically when I was flipping houses in 2012-2015 had a lot of corporate investors buying up low income properties, fixing them up, then renting them out.

> was already starting to cool down.

You seem to want it both ways. It was a misconception, but it apparently did happen, and apparently "cooled down?" I don't think all these things can be true.

It's highly possible they were heavily investing and were planning on continuing but people noticing and the social pushback it created caused them to change their minds about the strategy.

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.

People may or may not be. They may or may not be my neighbors. You seem to be pushing a set of ideals rather than a set of facts.

In raw numbers of ownership, sure.

But make no mistake, during the housing boom post 2019, in a lot of 'hot' metro areas, "wall street" was buying way more homes than individuals. Especially in the south. In the area I lived in, Invitation Homes, some weird shell company of Blackstone, was buying up every piece of tract housing they could get their hands on. At one point, they were making agreements with builders building out new neighborhoods to not sell to individuals since they wanted them all.

So no, I care far less about what my neighbor is doing because he or she isn't attempting to price out an entire city.

It might not solve the problem but we also have other countries buying up homes for pension accounts. Take AU for example doing this. Should be illegal regardless of the size.

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are

To a degree, but there's a whole tranche of investment vehicles that accredited investors use to invest in single-family homes that is not securitized at all, and not on Wall Street. The whole fix-and-flip industry feeds into this now, loaning out money to turn houses into rentals that some LLC holds.

If so, then we can at least put that myth to rest and move closer to a real solution. The only potential downside I see here is that maybe it pushes the real solution a bit further down the road.

Perfect for a big splashy press release. Populist policy with no practical benefit to the average American.

Also, the headline on HN is downright wrong.

"US will ban Wall Street investors" != "Trump says he will ban Wall Street investments..."

This a Truth Social post from the President. It doesn't mean it has happened, will happen or will happen in the form that either Trump says it will or is being implied here.

This is a very difficult issue to properly address for lots of legal/logistical reasons. For example - many legitimate homeowners have their homes registered as LLCs and most home legislation is governed by states.

Are my neighbors the ones sending me unsolicited text messages and letters about how they'd like to buy my property?

It has definitely cooled dramatically; even reasonable interest rates make the numbers pretty meh.

This feels very similar to the Canadian narrative that foreign (read: Chinese) investors are buying all the houses in Vancouver & Toronto. Does it happen? absolutely, but it's also a nice way to blame a segment that has no voice or recourse. It also allows us to turn a blind eye to the impact of a generation of essentially zero % interest rates and a country that holds twice as much of their wealth in houses as the US. Other popular targets: out-of-province home owners, vacation property owners, multi-generational properties.

Its true that its a small number, but when you look at the statistics as a function of "percentage of homes purchased in 2024" instead of "total percentage ownership of homes", it is a bit more substantial: My understanding is the number is closer to 2% for Institutional investors, and as high as 4% for major markets like Phoenix and Dallas.

What it will come down to is the exact wording of what Trump means by "large institutional investors" (his exact words on Truth).

(forgive me if I don my aluminum chapeau going forward)

> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.

So in '08 we saw the veil drop on the mortgage folks. For a brief moment the sort of advantage they were taking of individual homeowners (I'm including landlords here) was plain for all to see, because the systems they had built to extract that value had been pushed too far and started to break.

The really clever/evil/nasty thing that happened next was that they all said "we're sowwy" and pretended to close up shop on the Mortgage Backed Securities markets, while sowing the seeds for a resurgence in mortgage lending by having Fannie run REO-to-Rental programs that sold foreclosed homes in bulk to investors. It would have been too obvious in the numbers if large institutional investors had bought those directly, so they let mom and pop go into business as landlords, effectively buying obfuscation of the stream of finances for the cost of whatever margins they had to take a hit on to allow for low interest rates to pump housing prices up to a place where, like in 07, they could go back to fucking around with mortages.

In less word salady terms, the plan looked like so:

- "oh fuck we pushed it too far and here come the torches and pitchforks"

- Stop making money on mortgages, but we're investment banks as well as mortgage lenders, so we can make up for the loss of mortgage money by buying a more significant fraction of the housing market at near-zero interest rates

- Wait for low interest rates to pump housing prices over time

- Okay cool, people have forgotten about the whole 08 thing and we've peeled back all the subsequent regulation so we can go back to making our money bundling risky ass mortgage securities again <--- we are here>

The essence of the problem as I see it is that finance has gotten so byzantine and complicated that the only people who understand it in real time are the people who are actively trying to manipulate it to maximize their profits, and by the time it becomes clear what dirty tricks they're pulling they've moved on to the next grift so it looks like they're innocent.

The (now somehow) political position that blackrock is not the reason a house in Seattle is $1,000,000 is somehow the most hated position in America. Both my left wing friends and right wing family believe blackrock owns something like 30% of houses in America, and saying otherwise is heresy.

Correct. More specifically, your upper middle class neighbors whose incomes have grown far more than middle earners over the past few decades: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/cb...

The people responsible for the cost crunch middle class people feel isn’t billionaires. Bezos isn’t using his money to buy up houses or daycare spots in your neighborhood or Disney Word tickets. It’s upper quantile white collar workers. They are competing with the middle class for the same goods and services, but make much more money relatively than they did in past decades.

Unless your neighbor happens to be named Mr. Black Rock, private equity and wall street investors are indeed the #1 buyers of residential housing stock right now.

I love these professional lawyers running defense for large corporations.

This doesn't match what's been going on in my area. A local newspaper reported about a year ago that Black Rock owns 40% of the rental units.

Moreover, the fundamental problem is lack of supply.

Building has not kept pace with growth in households.

Random private equity newspaper isn't the most convincing source.

If "Black rock isn't buying up all the housing" then how do you explain why Blackrock lost $17 billion in capital today?

https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/200899449445747946...

It matters, you just dont want to know it matters.

That sounds right. And, I have to admit, it's pretty good politics to ban a mostly imaginary thing that is a popular talking point. Since it's barely going to affect anyone, it'll be easy to pass.

And it may win votes for Republicans in swing districts, since the "BlackRock bought all the houses!" line is heard much more often from the Left, meaning this is something you can show an on-the-fence voter to signal how you are against those evil Wall Street guys.

I wonder if he'll be able to resist slipping in some kind of small-time grift for a family member or campaign donor, though.

People are always looking for an outside villain in this story. Over the years it's been "Chinese buyers", AirBnBs, private equity, or "the rich" generally, but the thing is that the system is working exactly as it is supposed to. Middle class homeowners demand that their homes go up in value every year and they get what they want. Homes are explicitly called investments my every mainstream organization with any stake in the game. The ones responsible are indeed your neighbors, but not just the ones with investment properties. Talk to these people and between complaints about the price of eggs going up a buck or two you'll hear them mention "property values" frequently in casual conversation and beam with pride as they show you their Zillow Zestimate. Your government is happy for the increase in tax revenue (even as they carve out exemptions for their voter base). The ever increasing prices are all going to be paid by future generations, so there is no need to worry.

If Black Rock is guilty of anything here above all else, it's taking advantage of a situation deliberately created for someone else. If government policy wasn't already going balls to the wall trying to constantly pump up property values, there'd be no investment returns to be had.

Give me the levers of federal, state, and local government and I promise you I can completely tank property values in 48 hours or less.

I agree, but besides the fact that people overlook that the “C” in LLC is “Corporate” and most private rental investors will have put their real estate in an LLC; is that the real problem at the core is cheap, i.e., devalued money and low lending standards, that has made inefficient and reckless lending and investing possible, essentially the inverse of the BNPL ticking time bomb and the cousin of the housing bubble, i.e., fraud.

With house prices being driven up by reckless lending through a debased currency, you enter a feedback loop where every inflating currencies drive prices higher, which only fuels a further frenzy of lending (including through FOMO) to driver prices higher once again.