Nick Fountain

40 years old.

James' age.

In the early 90s, it was 28 years old.

Yes.

In fact, yesterday, Trump said he, quote, wants to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.

Still, a White House spokesperson told us that the president is committed to exploring every tool possible to improve housing affordability.

Yeah, it has to do with a premise that you have likely heard.

That big Wall Street investors are buying up single-family homes and those deep-pocketed investors are impossible to compete with.

Of all the popular ideas out there on why housing prices are so high, this is a big one.

In the world of politics, it's been mostly a thing you've heard from politicians on the left, though.

So we wanted to find out, will this policy help people like James when he gets back from Djibouti this summer?

Do you think the room is going to be more full given recent news?

Caitlin started looking into this subject when she got her first professor job at UT Austin.

It was 2022, on the heels of the pandemic and one of the sharpest rises in housing costs ever.

And she and one of her co-authors were having lunch, talking about how so many people were blaming big institutional investors, these giant Wall Street firms with access to tons of money for the bonkers cost of housing.

Sure.

With that in mind, Caitlin set out to research the actual impact of these big investors buying up properties on rent prices and on home prices.

So she started sorting through a database of basically all home sales in the U.S.

for more than a decade.

Like every home that was sold.