Erika Barris

Yes.

Of course, the biggest homeowner in America by name is not Landlords R Us or some Wall Street company.

It is James or Michael or Robert Smith.

That's of all housing units.

If you look at all the single-family homes and townhomes for rent, almost 3% are owned by big institutional investors.

But, and this is important, she found a lot of geographic concentration.

Areas where these Wall Street companies have bought a lot more homes.

Places like the suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Phoenix.

You know, Sunbelt cities with nice suburbs and growth potential.

For example, there's a census tract in San Antonio where these investors own more than 12% of all housing units.

And almost a third of these single family and townhomes.

So the next question Caitlin wanted to figure out was, in the places where these big institutional investors were buying up the most real estate, were rent prices and housing prices lower or higher than in similar neighborhoods?

This was in the aftermath of the housing crisis.

It was investors' first big foray into becoming big landlords.

And what they were doing was buying up foreclosed properties that had been owner occupied and converting them to rentals.

increasing the rental supply.

In other words, Caitlyn found evidence that her hypothesis that this would be a boon for renters was right.

Caitlin says she's hoping to study this more to figure out what exactly is going on.

She thinks part of this could have been just a technological advantage.

The big landlords had fancy and maybe not even legal pricing software that helped them anticipate what people would pay to move to bigger homes in the suburbs during the COVID housing scramble.