Erika Barris

But last week, President Trump signed an executive order.

I have it pulled up right here.

It is called stopping Wall Street from competing with Main Street homebuyers.

And last week at his big speech in Davos, he talked directly to those Wall Streeters.

To figure that out, we needed to understand how many houses institutional investors are actually buying, what they're doing with them, and how that's affecting prices.

So we called up Caitlin Gorbach, who co-wrote one of the first economics research papers looking at this.

How are you doing?

Yes.

Timely and relevant.

In fact, the day we talked to her, Caitlin was getting ready to fly to Washington, D.C.

to talk about her paper in front of Treasury Department economists.

A boon.

A good thing.

Because institutional investors weren't just buying up houses and sitting on them.

They were converting them into rentals, which meant there were more rentals out there for people like Caitlin.

More supply.

So Caitlin thought rents should go down.

And the first thing she needed to figure out was, was this even happening on a large scale?

Like how much housing had these big investors bought up?

Yeah.