[postpawl]

The national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too.

Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.

[happyopossum]

In the past few years I’ve been involved in 7 real estate transactions in California, and haven’t seen a single “all cash offer from investors” on any of them.

I hear this rhetoric a lot, but it’s almost always from people who have never actually been involved in selling a home, or are shopping for a home way out of their price range and were going to get outbid anyway.

[postpawl]

That's surprising given the data. Were these transactions recent? Investors focus on entry-level properties, so if you're buying above that tier you'd see less competition. But California overall has high investor activity:

“In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.”

https://www.dailynews.com/2025/09/11/36-of-california-homebu...

[senordevnyc]

OK, well are the economics in those markets worse than similar markets with lower levels of PE ownership of homes? Is there a correlation there that we can see in the data? Because otherwise stats from a couple moderate sized cities doesn’t seem that relevant to the nation as a whole.

[postpawl]

The St Louis fed did a study about this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2020/2020-04...

“We find that investors' purchases increase the price-to-income ratio, especially in the bottom price-tier”

[pembrook]

Owning 1 in 9 "rental" homes means they own less than 1% of all homes.

You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.

PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).

[osiris970]

Time to build!

[postpawl]

Building helps, but without addressing who gets to buy the new stock, you're potentially just building inventory for PE portfolios.