Writes Greg Privette:

Hi Lew,

I read a housing market blog regularly. 

The gentleman who runs the blog posts paragraphs from various articles along with links to the original in case you want to read the entire thing. I am seeing article excerpts like the following regularly:

A report from WGHP on North Carolina. “Investment firms are scooping up more and more homes for sale in the Triad. Diane Spivack, a resident of Brightwood Farm, started asking herself who her neighbors were when she saw some people on her street not maintaining their homes or abiding by the HOA code. She quickly discovered more than 100 of the over 600 homes in her neighborhood aren’t owned by a person or family but by a handful of hedge funds and investment groups. The homes are then rented to single families.”

After the last housing melt down a lot of the housing stock that had come into being during the late 90’s and early 2000’s wound up being owned by banks and equity firms and became rentals. When I was looking for a new place to rent about five years ago, I found what appeared to be nearly entire streets that were rental houses. They were managed by far off property management firms. The only difference this time is the houses are being bought up ahead of the crash by equity firms. When money is “free” they do not care what they pay. A lot of housing is moving to ownership by these firms. The process is additionally creating a bigger downstream problem by raising the price of houses so the rubes who buy now are even farther underwater than they otherwise would be, making them more susceptible to losing the house during the next crash. Yet more housing stock to wind up in the hands of the banks to be sold off cheap to the equity firms while the taxpayers bail out the banks. A truly viscous cycle with the final result being “You will own nothing and be happy”.