Are you saying that Blackrock et al wouldn't buy homes if there weren't Zillow/OpenDoor/Offerpad? For Blackrock to rent these out, they clearly have to staff up a property management arm. Z/O/O might have made it easier for them to acquire some of these homes, but I don't see why they would not have bought a roughly equivalent amount even without them. As per the article:

> A representative for FirstKey Homes, a Cerberus portfolio company, said that it's purchased just 1% of its properties through iBuyers. Kathleen McCarthy, global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate, said that “not one of our portfolio companies have purchased a single off-market home from an iBuyer.”

I am absolutely agreeing that the steep rise in home/rent prices are a serious problem. But I am not convinced that iBuyers are moving the market that much, and the root of the problem in the most displaced markets remains NIMBYs that prevent new construction that prevent supply to rise up to meet increasing demand.

I also recommend these 2 articles by Philo which talk about the effectively-cartel like behavior that exists in the housing market:

https://philo.substack.com/p/housing-medallions

https://philo.substack.com/p/cartels (a shorter summary is here - https://ilearned.substack.com/p/13-on-competition-and-monopo...)