Wall Street is Getting into the Landlord Business

This video is from earlier this summer, so you can ignore her pronunciations about a normal summer and covid declining. May was such an innocent time wasn’t it? Either way, the thrust of this story has to do with the housing market. You may have heard that wall street is now buying up homes as fast as possible and even whole neighborhoods to flip or to rent out. This means that rather than giving out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, these companies are locking people into rental agreements long-term with no chance of ownership. I’ve already written about the fact that this might make the economy more flexible but having all of housing owned by a handful of companies isn’t exactly an upgrade either. If you’re trying to buy a house right now, it is easy to lose out on a great home due to an all-cash offer from an investor. Even Zillow is getting into the game by sucking up housing stock as fast as possible. In this video from The Hill, we talk about the housing crisis in the United States and how Wall Street is integral to creating the problems we now see.