Neil Freiman

That was Wall Street.

So they started buying up these dilapidated homes, often at foreclosure auctions.

to the point where it steadily increased.

And then by 2022, this is during peak COVID housing boom, investors were buying more than one in every four single family homes sold.

Fast forward to 2004 and 2005, they have become, you know, certainly a scapegoat, or certainly a lot of people are blaming them for squeezing housing prices higher and not allowing the average homeowner to get into that starting home.

So I would say people on both sides of the aisle are

point to the growth of institutional investors in the housing market as one reason why we're seeing home prices soar 50% in the last six years.

If you talk to economists in the housing industry, a lot of them say that actually institutional investors provide a very important role in the housing market.

They do push back against the criticisms of Blackstone and their ilk getting into the market because they say, look, the housing market right now, not a lot of people are forking over anything to buy houses.

And the institutional investors backed by Wall Street

have a ton of cash to play with.

And they are actually providing really important liquidity to the market.

There's all what we need is more housing.

We need to spur more home building.

And the fact is that there's just not a lot of demand.

So they are providing a lot of crucial demand.

And on the other side, they're also Wall Street is known to buy fixer uppers essentially and and refurbish them at a lot higher rates than the average homeowner.

So they say for those two things, actually, they don't mind that Wall Street is in the game.

Yeah, I think the big headline here is that the United States is essentially taking de facto control of oil production in Venezuela, quote unquote, indefinitely.

And they say they want that to have leverage.