Nick Fountain

And then tried to figure out who were the buyers of the greatest number of homes.

She sorted by most frequent buyer.

And it came up with.

Wait for it.

Finding all the homes that big institutional investors had bought up was going to be harder than that.

It was going to take some sleuthing, like maybe hundreds of hours searching corporate records, looking through legal filings, trying to identify the big landlords and then trace them to their cryptically named shell companies that were buying houses.

Yes.

Let's make a movie about you guys.

In the end, and we should mention this is a working paper, not officially published yet, and only includes data through 2022, she calculated the share of all housing units owned by these big Wall Street firms.

The percentage goes higher if you look at just purchases instead of ownership.

Caitlin found that from 2010 to 2022, institutional investors were responsible for 5% of single-family and townhome purchases nationwide.

And we should say there are lots of different ways to crunch the data, and other reviews of it have come up with different and sometimes higher estimates of ownership by big landlords.

Caitlyn focused her investigation on the specific group that you hear Trump saying he wants to ban from buying up properties, large institutional investors.

But regardless, Caitlyn and everyone agree, the issue is concentrated in these Sunbelt cities and suburbs.

That's where that idea that big companies are buying up a lot of properties, it is very real.

And she said the answer was yes.

Basically, it depends on when you were talking about, what time frame.

For example, there was a period when the industry was first kicking off that rents fell in neighborhoods with a lot of houses owned by big investors in comparison to similar neighborhoods.

And she found a few years later, there was this period when in these Sunbelt neighborhoods with lots of these large landlords, the sale price of the houses actually fell.

So the opposite of what people fear.