Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Key piece of information from the article:

> The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups.

So the mega investors only make up 3% of that 25%. I'd love to see data on what the remaining 22% are, but my guess is:

* flippers

* middle class individuals buying a second property as an investment

* small time property management firms run by local businesses

Also the Inside Economics podcast's recent episode Cooling Inflation and Confounding Housing Riddles[0] adds even more interesting color to the dialog. They explain that a lot of this is driven by demand for single-family home rentals. Roughly half of Americans will want/need to rent a single-family home at some point in their lives! Many people want to live in a home on a short-term basis, like when a family with kids moves to a new city and wants to familiarize with the area before committing to a full mortgage. And COVID combined with the changing demographics has caused a huge surge in demand, so surprise prices have also gone up.

[0] https://moodys-talks-inside-economics.simplecast.com/episode...

Don't forget the "kilo" investors, who may only own a few dozen or hundreds of homes ;)

Being curious about what those numbers actually look like, I found a CoreLogic report[1] from earlier this year which states:

> Figure 3 shows different investor classes have maintained their shares through Q1 2022. Small investors (those who own fewer than 10 properties) were responsible for nearly half (48%) of all investor purchases during the first quarter of the year. Medium investors (those with 11 – 100 properties) purchased 31% of investor properties, large investors (those with 101 – 1,000 properties) accounted for 9% of home purchases and mega investors (those with over 1,000 properties) represented 12% of all purchases.

So it sounds like roughly half of investor purchases (not quite that) are from those owning at most 10 properties. Would be interesting to see how well these numbers extrapolate out over time; from this limited Q1 perspective it sounds like the majority of purchases are by medium/large/mega investors.

[1] https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/single-family-investo...

The 1/4 of houses being bought by investors makes this sound like way more than it truly is... I bet 90% of those "investors" are flippers.

Flippers are a necessary part of the market... lots of old people stop maintaining their home as they age. When they finally die, their homes are in extremely bad shape and no one would want to live there. A flipper makes the home habitable again.

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