Nick Fountain

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.

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.