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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Someday, someone is going to do research into the psychology of all this. People will turn to anything besides looking at the lack of housing supply and the local politics that cause that shortage. RealPage! Blackrock! Foreign buyers!

Meanwhile, those of us who are involved and actually go to hearings in our cities see the same thing over and over again. Our 'neighbors' fighting to stop housing: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

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I mean, 1 in 4 family homes in America is owned by a private equity firm now. That's certainly not helping.

It begs the question of how many "neighbors" are actually being neighborly. I'd be surprised if industry groups weren't paying people to attend local-city meetings on their behalf.

See, this is what I mean. These people are doing it all on their own, of their own volition. There is no big bad bogeyman behind them. They're just NIMBYs. They are that way for a variety of reasons, which is an interesting topic on its own, but I've met and talked with them and they have arrived where they're at without some Shadowy Corporation paying them off.

I mean, it's pretty easy to understand if you just look at motivations. For most people who own a house, it's a pretty big part of their net worth. Nobody wants the value of their house to go down, and if you allow construction of more housing that is what will happen.

Local council members fear geting voted out if they make constituents unhappy.

We need both sides to think of the good of the community as greater than their own financial/power interests. But that's very hard to actually do.

Yes, that's part of it, but I think it goes beyond that, having observed these people close up for several years. I think for some, it's a real fear of change. Others are closet classists/racists who do not want 'those people' in their 'nice' neighborhood. Some on the left are more upset about a developer making some money than about people not having housing. It's a complex subject.

Source? That seems like the laughable lie that originated from a certain TikToker.

GP has confused percentage of purchases in some recent year(s) with percentage of ownership. Also conflated "private equity" with all investor-owned homes (which includes a huge chunk of publicly traded REIT stuff too).

Investor-owned in some recent year(s) exceeded 25% of purchases. Private equity was a subset of that.

Overall private equity owns like... 1-1.5% of housing units (which includes a ton of apartments).

"Investor owned homes" also includes an absolute ton of housing where someone owns a second house and rents it out.

Yup that's a good point too. Of the ~25% purchased by investors, like 80%+ of those are individuals with a portfolio of <10. Big funds are like <5% of the 25%.

Yes, 25% of current ownership seems high to me. Most homes have been owned for decades. But percent of new purchases is a leading indicator of where the market is heading.

It's a trend because housing is scarce. Some of these companies come right out and say this stuff in their SEC filings. They're telling you that they will lose money if more housing comes online.

Where are you getting that statistic? I have seen considerably lower numbers.

For example, [1] indicates only 1 in 60 rental homes are owned by private equity. That doesn't even include owner-occupied homes.

[1]: https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/2022/06/letters-to-congress...

Regardless it's a growing and worrying trend. Especially as they target and exploit the most vulnerable like mobile home parks and nursing homes.

No one would mind if they were building new homes or significantly improving the facilities in proportion of their rent increases.

> No one would mind if they were building new homes

I get what you're saying - producing new homes is actually what we need and would be more beneficial compared to just buying up existing housing stock - but the same NIMBYs who I mentioned further up would actually be upset about people building new homes.

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