alt Hacker News"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.
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The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes"
> 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.
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
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.
Indeed. This was discussed about a month ago. My prior comment:
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.
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.