Who's Buying Up All the Homes in America?

Who's Buying Up All the Homes in America?

Okay, let's talk about two groups that everybody loves, Congress and corporations. Now that's a joke, but we need to talk about both of them here because Congress is going after some large hedge fund backed investors who are buying up thousands and thousands and thousands of homes, okay?

So right now, as of late of 2011, there was no single investor who owned more than 1,000 homes in the United States. However, the top five companies that are essentially buying up as many single family homes as they possibly can, the top five companies own collectively over 280,000 homes, okay?

Now why are these corporations buying up all of these single family homes? Because there's such a strong demand for housing and there's such a low supply. So it's in their best interest to buy as many single family homes as they can and then rent them out because they're going to make money off the rent and they're going to make

money off the appreciation and they're going to get tax breaks for depreciation. So for a large corporation that has a lot of money, buying single family homes is a gold mine. What's the problem?

Well, those 280,000 homes would have probably been purchased by first time homebuyers, maybe low to middle income buyers and or both. So this is actually kind of becoming a problem so much so that Congress is having to try to deal with this and try to come up with a solution.

And unfortunately, we know how good Congress is at coming up with solutions, but hopefully something can be done because like I said, if this trend continues where corporations are just basically gobbling up all of the housing inventory in the country, that's going to turn us into a nation of renters rather than a nation of homeowners.