Some of California’s most powerful lawmakers have taken aim at corporate landlords this legislative session. The precise impact and effect of institutional investors on California housing is hard to assess.
Defenders of the business model applaud the role it played in propping up local housing markets and quickly filling homes that would have otherwise sat vacant and derelict. Critics liken thesedepriving would-be homeowners of a shot at the American Dream while hoarding the profits of the last decade’s run-up in national home prices and rents.
Ward’s bill uses Lee’s 1,000-property cut off, but also specifically calls out those trusts in his bill language., according to an estimate by the Urban Institute, though the report’s authors concede that the “data and definitions are somewhat fuzzy.” “I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market,” said Daryl Fairweather, economist with the real estate listing website RedFin. “People want to blame someone for high home prices, and it’s easy to blame investors just because they’re, like, an opaque group of people…Really, the problem is just the lack of supply of housing.”
“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.
predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. A study in the Netherlands found that when cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, theIn places where home prices are out of reach for the average person, putting more single-family houses on the rental market gives more people the opportunity to enjoy some of the trappings of the American Dream — a yard, a garage, maybe a better school district — even if they can’t afford a down payment.