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I work for a huge bank that's investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don't plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.
Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they're pretty sure they're going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It's a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.
It's not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, "systemic risk" but that's a very large topic that I'm not going to cover here.
The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.
...but why nowโฝ Why haven't they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they've been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don't have anyone living in them.
Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).
These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They're also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.
This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don't need as much maintenance as they used to. They're so much cheaper to maintain en mass.
So how do we fix this problem? There's all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:
Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.
There's lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It's a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they're straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there's various loopholes which I won't get into).
Progressively higher property tax for multiple homes seems like a good start.
I have always thought the best method to deal with it is to tax all properties owned beyond the first, or uninhabited homes. So the single family home owned by a family who lives there doesn't see much property tax increase but anyone owning 2 or more homes does. Based on your experience would this be a viable solution? Or am I missing something obvious here?
Most real estate is owned by "123 street LLC", meaning each LLC owns a single house/building. I'm not even sure how you would get around that realistically, and it's not just companies that do that. If I ever get to the position of buying a house (....yeah right lol), I intend to do the same thing.
On top of that it gets weird with multiple houses because they're in different locations with different tax rates and AHJs. Even within the same city you can be paying taxes to different counties. I'd like to see something like owning 2 houses = 2x taxes, 3 = 3x, etc. But then people could game it based on different tax rates, so you'd have to have a system to apply it to each AHJ equally.
You only have to look into this very thread to see even people screwed over by the housing market also don't want there to be more housing.
It's clear preventing housing from being built has become entrenched in Americans on the left and the right.
Again, there isn't some magical limit to the amount of housing we can build. If a big bank wants to keep lots of Units empty and drive up the price.... a high price is a market signal to produce more housing.
Americans are taught that the house is your primary wealth vehicle. People with homes don't want more housing because their net worth would cut in half, people without homes bitch about home pricing but still want to buy BECAUSE they are a wealth vehicle.
Until we move away from single family homes being the #1 "investment vehicle" for everyday Americans, the system is going to snap right in half before it gets better.