Joint Center for Housing Studies

• Critics say this practice drives up home prices and worsens the housing shortage, making it harder for families to afford to buy.
• So I analyzed more than 1 million property sales in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 2007 to 2016.
• I found that global investment firms buying up local properties are indeed hurting Atlanta families – specifically, Black ones.

Neighborhood transformations

• For an average neighborhood, home purchasing by large corporate investors explained one-quarter of that decline.
• They’re even more concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where more than 10 houses in a row can be owned by the same corporation.
• In my study, I found that large investors tend to snap up housing in majority-nonwhite, lower-income suburban neighborhoods.

Home is where the financial security is

• Despite this, the national homeownership rate declined by 5.5 percentage points between 2007 and 2016, reaching a five-decade low of 62.9%.
• To be sure, policies like racial covenants, discriminatory mortgage lending practices and redlining fueled low homeownership rates for Black Americans long before the Great Recession.
• But global investors’ growing control of single-family homes only widens existing racial gaps in homeownership and wealth.

Directions for new research

• While my study focused on Atlanta, it’s not the only place where residents are competing with global investors for housing.
• Investment firms’ single-family rental portfolios are largely concentrated in Sun Belt metro areas, including Phoenix, Charlotte and Jacksonville.
• Many investment firms have recently been switching from a buy-to-rent business model to a build-to-rent model, which could complicate matters.

An open-source tool for housing policy research

• It’s been hard for researchers to identify corporate-owned, single-family homes, since it requires proprietary real-estate data and labor-intensive number crunching.
• Using data-driven approaches like this is an important step toward developing policy solutions.

Brian Y. An does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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