Three companies own 19,000 rental houses in Atlanta, GA

If so then antitrust laws kick in from three different companies colluding on this.

However, I'm skeptical of much pricing control. Few other markets have such widely distributed market share. There is some stickiness in that people don't want to move often, but unless there's a major shortage (which would be the true cause of high prices), it's hard for a 5% owner to exert much on the market.

Not when it requires collusion between 3 separate legal entities.

If they have so much pricing power, why are their returns less than SP500? Who would want to lose money compared to a risk-less investment where you don’t have to do any work?

Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Paramount, Disney??? There's a crapton of players trying to make streaming happen, and no evidence that they're making massive margins.

Many people complain about streaming fragmentation not the other way around. And it's an extremely optional product.

And did Google ever actually promise unlimited storage for all time? (And there's still a lot of free storage. I finally broke down and added some more but just so I could avoind managing how much I was using.)

Rent (in dollar terms) is the most you will ever pay per month.

Mortgage (in dollar terms) is the least you will ever pay per month.

Combine that with the ease of movement between renting and owning and it's absolutely something many people prefer.

> Why would someone prefer to give away money instead of invest it into their net worth ?

You mean… how. Cash? Mortgage? Buying is easy, running the thing not necessarily. What are you going to do if you lose the job? Health? What’s your plan for when you get old? Do you see the work around the house?

Do you remember Lehman Brothers and why it happened? Because so many thought they could afford it! Have they increased their net worth?

Is that a new build? Second hand? How old? When is the roof to be replaced? Hows the isolation? What’s the quality of windows and doors? Is the electrical installation ready for solar panels? And so on…

> Are there really people that prefer renting, and wouldn’t buy even if they could afford to?

Obviously.

Yes, a moment's thought should reveal that this is the case.

Buying and selling a house costs about 10% (or more) (realtors, expenses, etc). So if you buy a house today for $200k, and sell it tomorrow for $200k you will lose about $20k. (Yes, there are flipping tricks and stuff you can do to reduce that, but there are costs for normal transactions.)

So the rule of thumb is "about seven years" - if you buy today, and sell in seven years, appreciation and such will "break even". Certainly if appreciation was insanely high, that will be a shorter period, if it is bad or a crash happens, it may be longer or even underwater.

But whatever the time period is, if you will not live in the house for that number of years, you're better off renting, unless rental prices are so high as to invert it.

Another example of this is where businesses often prefer to lease (even so far as to triple-net) for tax purposes and to free up capital.

For awhile, I was friendly with a person who had a lot of material success and was recently retired.

He explained why he preferred renting to me: In the end, it was less hassle for him. All of the "upkeep" was someone else's responsibility. He just wrote a check every month.

(Granted, I prefer owning my own home.)

I don't begrudge any company investing and expanding their business, but when there are so many LLCs and layers of complexity to get problems resolved (as stated in the article) seems rather like an intentional obfuscation.

"Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." - from Wikipedia, but that's more or less the classic definition. I think there are many potent critiques of a poorly regulated capitalist environment one can make without twisting the definition.

Housing is something that has been spectacularly fucked in the US for historical reasons - white flight, zoning, redlining, Reagan-era policies to enrich the white burbs in perpetuity. Most of the policies that are aiding property speculators and mass landlords were intended to help "grandma keep her house," and keep "those kinds of folks" away. Naturally business noticed that this was an insanely good deal for the American homeowner and decided to get in on it, and in a large-business friendly regulatory environment we have a hard time making the case that these companies are doing something wrong.

But what if.. one's existing capital isn't a right to exercise to begin with?

Don't know about the pitchforks, but one doctor has you covered in the shovel department [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/zZL5pHmpCG0

I'm worried about the housing crisis that is gripping so many countries where regular people are utterly incapable of buying houses because they're wildly unaffordable and there are not enough.

Private companies can profit of commercial real estate. They can profit off manufacturing and consulting.

They should not be allowed to profit on thing basic essentials that people in our society need to live when doing so means some people simply miss out.

How would you feel if we were at a buffet for every meal and a private company took so much food you and your family got barely scraps, day after day, year after year?

That is PRECISELY what we're doing with housing.

Companies are not people. Because these companies are buying residential property, actual people miss out.

Would you be OK with a private company owning so much drinking water you and your family miss out?

Do the majority believe that 3 companies owning 19,000 homes between them in a particular city is harmful/undesirable behavior? Why? There's nothing obviously bad about that fact alone. How many houses are in Atlanta? The possibility that there are hundreds of LLCs shared between these 3 companies seems a bit suspect on the surface, but I could see how they could be simply acquiring smaller companies naturally. Idk how difficult it is or isn't to consolidate smaller LLCs into larger ones, but the implication of the article seems to be that this is a deliberate tactic to limit the amount of money these companies can be sued for in any one given case. Maybe, but would need more details to see that this is clearly what is happening and how much harm it is causing to aggrieved tenants.

None of those would do much against these behemoths, but they would harm the smallest landlords (which might be the intention).

The "best" might be to adjust property tax on a given description of dwelling unit such that it's pretty annoyingly high, but each family effectively gets one for free. Then corporations and multi-unit owners would pay that, but individuals wouldn't.

Prop 13 in CA would be much less of an issue if it excluded commercial real estate and only applied to "homesteads" owned and held by the resident owners.

In a just society we would have laws that prevent this sort of thing, instead of lobbying by these corporations to prevent the passing of them in the first place, so people like you can go “well it’s not illegal therefore it’s ok”

> In a just society, we'd identify what specific law they broke and try them based on that

... and we would have the ability to get laws that best benefit society passed.

Unfortunately

- It's almost impossible to actually hold anyone with significant money accountable for anything

- It's almost impossible to hold any company accountable for anything

- It's almost impossible to get good laws passed, because the companies pay to get the lawmakers elected

Or lobby/advocate for establishment of new laws that might be needed now, which may not have been needed in the past.

Humans are inventive and creative (and often greedy). Once we find a loophole or a point of advantage, we tend to exploit it.

For better or worse, the US legal system is slow to change so it takes a long time of people exploiting the system before the legal framework catches up.

This morning I was reading some outrage post in a local facebook group for my small town. Everyone is up in arms about a new apartment complex being built. Then someone chimes in on the thread asking where everyone was when the permits were approved (hint: no one complaining attended the meetings to voice their concerns). TLDR: get involved in local politics. Too many people assume someone else will do it (or other people will vote so I don't have to), and rarely is that the case.

A reminder not to throw the baby (culture) out with the bathwater.

Maybe if it was called and treated as a landlord revolution it would have gone better.

This.

For those of you who DON'T know the history. Mao did just what OP wants.

It went very very badly. Like millions of people died badly.

Small-landlords are almost always a "mistake" on one side or the other. Most of them have an incorrect assessment of the costs associated with being a landlord, and this depresses the rental market and also traps them, making them do unethical and illegal things, like not maintaining properties, etc. And if the only reason they're renting their property is because it appreciated and they're carrying a low-interest rate mortgage, they're almost certainly not accounting for the costs. When people realize you can't rent properties profitably and pay a property management firm to manage it, they realize they're not a landlord, they're an underpaid property management firm for the bank. That only makes sense if appreciation is nuts and you can go long on huge leverage.

The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses.

I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties

In a just society we'd have something akin to a land value tax.

That would make land-lording into a low profit respectable profession and would drive slumlords out of business. The only way to profit would be to actually be good at it would be to manage homes well. Margins would come from that, not from property speculation (how trump made his money).

It would also create a titanic amount of tax revenue from the non-productive economy (land hoarding) which would mean that taxes could be reduced or even eliminated on the productive economy (e.g. income taxes).

Ownership comes with privileges for the cost. Sure, you have to deal with major repairs, but you also get to choose the designs, colors, layout, and more for your house, and you don't have someone watching over your shoulder to "preserve their investment" beyond the bank requiring insurance.

Ownership has other advantages for society beyond that, there's a reason people say "drive it like a rental".

"Three corporate landlords control nearly 11 percent of the single-family homes available for rent in metro Atlanta’s core counties"

The closest I have ever gotten to somebody articulating how it makes the world worse was a homeowner saying that they didn't like it because it allowed renters into their neighborhood.

But I'm guessing there's some other reason that you think this makes the world worse. Can you tell me how?

Indeed, this is a political problem to solve with statute.

Can you explain why this should not happen at all? From the renter's experience, corporate landlords are more likely to follow the law.

From the perspective of homeowners, I can see that this adds another competitive player, and allows lower-income renters into wealthier neighborhoods.

I do not see why this should not happen at all.

Some of the largest investors in private equity REITs are retirement funds.

Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH) is part of S&P500, so I'd say very many (owning a tiny share). Ownership of INVH is overwhelmingly institutional (investment/mutual/retirement funds): https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INVH/holders