Amanda Cantrell

Amanda was searching in one suburb in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and she noticed a lot of the houses were owned or managed by big corporations.

This feeling of unfairness crosses the political spectrum.

The 21st Century Road to Housing Act is a bill aimed at improving housing affordability.

It was passed in a bipartisan sweep, and this bill restricts large institutional investors from owning too many single-family houses.

And I'm Waylon Wong.

Stephen Billings is a professor of real estate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Stephen starts the story during the 2008 Great Recession, when homes all around the country were going into foreclosure.

Finance people would take a whole lot of properties with these regular cash flows and sell it as an investment product.

Some of these are called real estate investment trusts or REITs.

For investors in REITs, it's a way to get skin in the real estate game without needing to do the messy work of actually being a landlord.

Stevens says there's a grain of truth here.

But just a grain of truth, because these companies make up such a small share of home purchases nationally, less than 1%.

The much bigger drivers of housing prices are low construction and low interest rates.

Lori Goodman runs the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think tank.

She's also involved in the housing industry as a consultant.

Lori points out that institutional investors tend to buy houses that are in worse condition than average and then fix them up.

Now, Stephen Billings' research has painted a more nuanced picture here.

He finds that for similar houses, apples to apples, institutional landlords actually apply for fewer renovation permits than other owners.

But the point remains that institutional investors do tend to buy up homes in need of a sprucia, and they do spend tens of thousands of dollars on quickly tidying them up.

Adrienne Todman agrees.