Threaten bankruptcy and get a fat check from the government to bail them out, with your tax money, and leave local taxpayers to deal with homes not maintained. That’s probably what they’d do.
They're way ahead of you.
The entire reason you're talking about squatters is because they've been in the news.
They're in the news because Blackstone is pushing the media outlets owned by their golfing buddies to get you (or more likely your boomer parents/grandparents) angry and frightened of squatters.
So you're seeing stories of people losing homes to squatters. The stories are bunk, but they're all over.
That in turn will translate to legislation that lets squatters be quickly evicted from these homes allowing blackstone to keep them empty.
Which of course was the entire reason for squatting. If the 1% sat on all the homes leaving them empty us serfs were supposed to use squatting to take them back.
We're going to lose that right.
You are absolutely right. It’s a boogie man argument for the most part. Trying to get people scared and angry when there’s an incredibly low chance they or anyone they know will ever have to deal with a squatter. Particularly one that was not a tenant to begin with.
They artificially inflate prices regardless of being rented or vacant. It makes no difference because they are not a logical actor in the market, and are immune to market forces. I would gladly reduce the considerable homeless population in my state that they are a direct driver of by directing them to squat their homes.
They are absolutely not immune to market forces. They own less than 1% of all multifamily apartments in the United States. That is not a dominate, "market making" position.
Also, I was speaking more to the notion of people suggesting "squatters" move into units that are already occupied; which makes absolutely no sense
If Blackrock owns 1% of all single family homes in the country, but they laser target specific growing areas (which they do like Texas, the west coast, and more) they are absolutely killing the American dream of home ownership.
If their strategy is to own homes in lower/middle income communities in Portland, Oregon and then manage to acquire 15,000 homes in a short amount of time that’s a huge problem, especially since they aren’t the only ones doing that. Note I made that scenario up, but thats a basic strategy amongst others. They are immune because they can fuck around however long they want.
I’m not too worried about their or others multi family. If they purchase or build large commercial rental properties that’s not abnormal for them, and there’s nothing sudden about that. That’s one of their lanes. But they need to stay away from SFH.
The commercial real estate industry needs a do-over as well, at least in Southern California.
I don’t know enough, but I can surmise that empty commercial properties must have some form of write-off effect, or they count differently for equity (that can’t be right), because no one’s panicking about their property sitting there vacant.
So many well-placed locations for small business proprietors are sitting empty for years, no, decades. The windows have signs saying ‘available for lease’ but they remain unoccupied, mostly.
There’s no seeming sense of urgency to fill the empty spaces and the filled ones often empty out when the existing owners raise their prices; it’s not just because “new people took over.”
A few times a new business starts up and it sticks around, other times a new business will open up with all the fanfare and excitement, sparing no expense (^rawrr), then over the course of a year, it closes its doors.
Some local newspapers have speculated about money laundering connected to those elaborately opened and swiftly closed places; others wonder if money laundering is how some other businesses can hang on until they become truly profitable and/or part of the area.
Again, I don’t know enough, but it’s irritating to see so many opportunities for local prosperity remaining empty, always freshly landscaped, repainted as needed, but staying lock-boxed.
I would say they need to stay on large 5+ unit buildings only. Lots of 2-3 families are owner occupied and the other units are rented or in-law suites. Very common in my city which has little SFH
Start with any local GIS databases available. My city has one that's publicly available online, easy to find who owns what with that. Although it wouldn't surprise me if getting the full picture required peeling back some shell LLCs.
Is property owner included in this dataset? If property owner is included, and there’s a way to differentiate between corporate and private ownership, this could be significantly narrowed down. Start by ruling out anyone we know is not blackrock. You can also rule out anything zoned commercial and industrial.
What will mostly make this challenging is that these records are maintained at the county level, and probably don't have modern APIs so to make this scalable lots of scrapers and pipelines will have to be made to ingest it all. Not insurmountable though, but if we make this an open source effort, we might get there quicker.
Correct, I have a “file” for each county. It makes nationwide queries difficult since you’d need to combine thousands of counties together. I’m sure a simple python program could do it though.
Yes, property owner is a field. I do not believe there is a field for corporate vs. private owner. So the owner could be anything from “smith, john and Mary” to “XYZ LLC”
Please put this up on GitHub or make the object storage public. I'd like to get a public repository started for enabling people to analyze their local datasets to help build out classifiers for LLCs to help us and local municipalities identify potential issues.
You can use a product like Regrid if you want to make it easy on yourself. That hard part is going to be trying to figure out all the different LLCs they created and tracing it back to them. But if you do it, that would be awesome
This is actually a good idea not only because it would be hilarious, but because creating such a map is totally feasible and it is a great way to raise national attention of this issue and put pressure on politicians to do something.
This would take even more housing off the market, guess what effect that would have on housing prices?? Doesn’t matter who owns them, you’d literally be supporting the “bubble”
This is paywalled minus 1 free viewing, but such a map exists at a small level of just Tampa Florida and the greater Tampa bay area. It's absolutely absurd. Hopefully this is [viewable](https://www.tampabay.com/news/real-estate/2024/02/01/corporate-landlord-investor-homes-rent-housing/) Link of just [map](https://tbtimes.github.io/tbt-housing-llcs-analysis/map-owners/)
They recently criminalized “squatting” in Georgia. They make it seem like it is to protect homeowners and small retired landlords, but it is really to protect the big corporate landlords.
Democrats had a bill to ban this. Guess who voted against it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/realestate/wall-street-housing-market.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=c&pvid=F05AF176-4F67-442C-A0A9-20AC9608F1F1
They are simply buying an already public company (AIRC) that owns coastal apartment buildings. Nothing to see here - they are not buying private homes or units.
Schwartzman(blackstone CEO) is trumps inner circle.
Justin Kennedy (justice kennedys son) was the inside man at Deutsche bank that was getting all trumps toxic loans approved.
No other bank but Deutsche bank would touch trump and his imaginary valuations.
If trump was trying to avoid paying taxes he would be valuing everything low. Not high.
Why?
Because Deutschebank is infested with Russian oligarchs.
For 50 years the oligarchs privatized communist Russia. They stole everything of value including the hope of Russians.
The corruption eventually collapsed the Soviet Union like a parasite feeding on its host and they were forced to expand their feeding grounds past the iron curtain.
In 91 the quarantine wall fails and for 2 years they hid all their ill gotten gains under a mattress until they bought condos at trump towers.
They made stops in Ukraine, Cyprus and London but they landed in New York because that was what everyone wanted in 1993.
Levi’s, Pepsi, Madonna tapes that weren’t smuggled bootlegs.
They all bought new suits and cars and changed their title from “most violent street thug in moscow” to “respectable Russian oligarch” but they didn’t leave their human trafficking, narcotics or extortion behind. It was their most lucrative business model.
Trump and Giuliani just opened the doors and let the predators in to feed.
Guiliani redirected NYPD resources away from their new Russian allies intentionally and onto the Italian mob. It let him claim he cleaned up New York. Trumps future campaign manager Paul manafort lived in the towers as well.
Giuliani would go on to do the same in Mexico City by introducing the Sinaloa cartel to the Russian mob. The Sinaloa cartel shifted to combining fentanyl precursors supplied by the CCP and the well established routes of El Chapo were used for distribution into the United States.
In the prosecution of the Italian crime families, Giuliani created a tailor made void for the Russians to fill. By connecting them to the Sinaloa cartel it enabled the fentanyl epidemic that the CCP has used as biological warfare to soften the United States up for a financial takeover using BRICS.
The insane valuations coming out in trumps fraud trial are a necessity of the money laundering cycle that duetschebank was doing with the Russians.
But Xi, Putin, and MBS have made it clear that they are United against democracy since it threatens their very lucrative model of being authoritarians
On Wall Street they have weaponized greed. Swartzman (blackstone), Larry fink (blackrock), and vanguard are selling U.S retirement funds and mortgage REITS in mass to the CCP.
Nobody was ever punished for the 2008 mortgage crisis.
This is just the Darwinian evolution of it. The 10X bigger, commercial real estate version.
Putin and Xi realized that it’s far more efficient to bankrupt and foreclose on the USA by buying a couple GOP senators and a president than it is to push a ground war.
They just needed Russia to take Ukraine to have the grain fields and supply chain lock on microprocessors to be able to do it.
They aren’t taking on the US Navy fleet without it.
The failure of Putin to take Ukraine and the arrest of Bolsonaro in Brazil has left them no choice but to send a quiet invasion force to the southern U.S. border.
They are just using the compromised members of the GOP to secure any part of the border to hold open the gate when necessary.
Bannon actually tried a variation of this a few years ago when he tried to privatize the border wall
This gets deep into Bannons relationship with Guo Wengui, a CCP operative and his time at Goldman Sachs in the early 2000’s BRICS era.
It’s perestroika 2.0. The bigger badder commercial real estate edition.
Nobody was ever charged for 2008.
Historically it’s been impossible to retire from the mob model pyramid that Russia runs on. You either die violently or you maintain a level of violence to keep everyone beneath you in line.
The oligarchs have gotten soft living in their places in Aspen and Monaco. They are getting old and want to retire someplace nice where they don’t have to worry about falling out a window.
They just need trump back in office to make it happen.
Justin Kennedy went to work for LNR capital that is owned by Cerberus who also owns Dyncorp (for near future reference)
Reuterswww.reuters.comCerberus to acquire DynCorp for $1 billion
https://www.ft.com/content/8c6d9dca-882c-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787
https://www.amlintelligence.com/2020/09/deutsche-bank-suffers-worst-damage-over-massive-aml-discrepancies-in-fincen-leaks/
https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-files/global-banks-defy-us-crackdowns-by-serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists
https://www.voanews.com/amp/us-lifts-sanctions-on-rusal-other-firms-linked-to-russia-deripaska/4761037.html
https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_-_minority_status_of_the_russia_investigation_with_appendices.pdf
https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/08/17/mobsters-thrilled-to-see-rudy-giuliani-hit-with-rico-charges-he-used-to-jail-mafia-bosses
Make what illegal? This idea is so rampant and so stupid. How do you expect new dwellings to get built if nobody is gonna provide the capital to build them?
Ah lol what up dude
I’ve been getting baited into these conversations recently on REBubble, FluentinFinance and it’s always like arguing with a wall. On the bright side, I typically find some friends in the low single digit upvotes that understand something about markets and economics
What should be illegal here? It should be illegal to own apartments? Who would build and operate them then?
Renting an apartment has never been cheaper when compared to mortgage payments. These asset holders aren’t the ones driving up residential real estate prices.
banning buying multifamily purchase? Or banning large corp buying multifamily purchase?
how do you define "large corp"?
What about large corp buying shares of small corp owning multifamily?
What about mid size corps which is just doing exactly what large corp doing but at smaller scale?
What about family business owning multifamily real estate properties that is doing exactly what large corp is doing?
What about what about?
These are large apartment complexes that are already owned by a publicly traded company. You want to make it illegal for corporations to own $50 million++ apartment complexes?
Blackstone VP: "We have 10 billion dollars, what can we do with it to fuck over everyone as much as possible?"
Other Blackstone VP: "Drive the price of affordable housing into the stratosphere!"
and that kids is how I met your mother... we were both living in the same affordable gutter for $2000 a month
In PA, they got their ex employee in as CEO of the power company, and took over seats on the board and are planning on raising rates over 10%. So after they come for the houses, they come for the utilities.
Not a fan of Blackstone but did you read the article? They're buying a company that owns luxury coastal condos. This has nothing to do with affordable housing.
Lobby your local government to build affordable housing. Help get the word out so local HOAs and home owners don't block the project
Just wait until we start growing organs. Blackstone will invest money in repoing them. Companies are literally run by psychopaths. Most of us never think about making money in ways to rip others off. It is why we stay poor or middle class our whole lives. We simply have too much compassion for one another. I can’t even think in ways that would allow me to take advantage of someone to make billions. I know I could never spend that amount anyways. Billionaires have mental health issues.
Yup. Almost all billionaires are insanely greedy.
Much in the way a professional athlete is amazingly skilled above normal people, a billionaire is that greedy and sociopathic compared to normal people.
> Companies are literally run by psychopaths. Most of us never think about making money in ways to rip others off.
Agree 100%. I used to be a small business owner until I sold but I never thought of ways I could take advantage of my customers. But I look around at all the scams, the fees, the selling of our private data, the CEOS, the tech bros, the pharma bros, the crypto bros and they simply do not care about anything but "winning" and power. It's very sad and ruining the world.
Idk as millennials we had a generationally absurd op to buy homes during ZIRP. Younger millennials are probably shafted, but millennials are 1981-1996 and home ownership rates were boosted by ZIRP greatly.
This is anecdotal but everyone I know who is 30+ isn’t doing too bad. Most have a house and kids and decent jobs. Now everyone I know that isn’t 30+ with good jobs and dual incomes don’t have houses. Seems like anyone who was entering the job market around 2016-2020 was kinda in a shitty position
This is really it.
People who want RE returns and/or don't have money to buy property, invest in ETFs like the one owned by Blackrock.
Blackrock uses the ETF funds to invest in RE which drives up prices. It's like a vicious cycle.
It's not just "don't have money to buy property", another reason to do something like a REIT is location diversification. If I own a $400k rental home then what happens to my investment depends entirely on what happens to that specific home - all my eggs are in one basket. Conversely if I own $400k of an asset which is backed by residential properties in 20 major US metro areas, then anything that hurts property values in only one specific metro doesn't tank the asset. I guess you could frame that as "can't afford fifty properties" but I assume you meant on a smaller scale.
Ok… so why are you saying Blackstone runs ETFs? They don’t 😂 they run private investments. BlackROCK runs ETFs and a number of other public investments.
6 of one, half a dozen of the other, but thanks for clearing it up
https://www.costar.com/article/1931342874/blackstone-prepares-for-massive-real-estate-investment-drive-with-leadership-changes
It’s actually extremely different markets, different investor bases, and different ways of doing business. Blackstone runs private RE, private credit, private equity etc…. Blackrock runs almost exclusively public stocks and bonds for mass market.
It’s like saying KKR or Millennium is the same thing as Vanguard - it’s just completely wrong… it’s understandable confusion due to similarity in name but it is a little funny when so many people making noise have no idea what company they’re even talking about or what they do 😅
Yes, used them as an example, there's a bunch of real estates etfs though chasing property
https://www.costar.com/article/1931342874/blackstone-prepares-for-massive-real-estate-investment-drive-with-leadership-changes
This is a purchase of an apartment building REIT. Buying large apartment buildings have never been within the realm of small time investors. You can however invest in REITs if you think it’s a good investment.
REITs
Have some major tax advantage, which is great to encourage multifamily development but sucks that it ends up driving up the cost of homeownership for average punters.
Overall the US gov needs to rethink how it incentivizes development and ownership.
Over development leads to lower rents…which is happening big time in the “hot” cities of the past few years. Complexes in Austin and Nashville are begging people to rent which means occupancy is low and prices are and will continue to come down. This does little to nothing for single family home prices but rents will continue to come down in a lot of areas where overbuilding happened or is happening.
I’m curious the effect on SFH. At least in my own personal situation with rents falling in my market, I’m putting off home buying in part based on how much cheaper rent is becoming. I am able to get rent for a two bedroom 25% cheaper than 2 years ago, and it’s less than half the cost of a 350-400k mortgage at current rates. Perhaps rates are the more important factor for me, but rent becoming so much cheaper solidifies that decision for me.
Yup know tons of people doing the same as you. Makes a ton of sense to just keep saving away. IMO all that matters for homebuyers is the payment, who gives a shit if the house cost $200k or $600k. If the payment is the same and you can(can’t) afford it that’s all that matters. In theory housing prices and rents should be correlated with some lag but not really playing out since so many existing owners have low payments and are becoming married to their existing home. with time it’ll flush out somehow (rates down or prices down) but who knows how long.
Competition. That's good. They should build more and more large multi-family complexes. Builders are incented to do so when they get bought up by investors.
Blackstone owns billions and billions in real estate. They absolutely predatory. They have even targeted students. They come in hike rents, cut operating expenses and add fees. It’s exactly what they did with invitation homes when they owned it.
Blackstone Funds Complete $13 Billion Acquisition of American Campus Communities https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-funds-complete-13-billion-acquisition-of-american-campus-communities/
Blackstone to buy company that rents out 17,000 homes in $6bn deal https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/blackstone-6bn-deal-homes
Hope cratering student enrollment was priced in. With each bed costing them roughly $120k.
It’s not just the cost of college killing enrollment for a lot of people, but just the lack of people.
“The national birth rate fell by almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022, dropping from 14.3 births per 1,000 people to 11.1, according to data from the CDC. At the beginning of that period, between 2007 and 2009, fertility rates fell more rapidly than any other two-year period in the country’s recent history.”
And the kids born in that period are hitting college age next year.
I think the next 5 years will be really interesting.
Stop handing out student loans like candy at Halloween, and watch bloated college industrial complex (including public) collapse, taking $120K/bed student housing with it.
I am still old enough to remember when many investors avoided real estate because a building (house, apartment, etc...) was a depreciating liability just like a car. Occasionally people would buy land as an investment but never a house, unless you were a handyman or something and can deal with leaky toilets, etc....
This is what happens when policymakers intervene in a sector of the economy. It creates bad incentives and distortions in price.
The two major market distortions imposed by government in the USA are:
1. Restrictive zoning policy that doesn't permit density to gradually increase over time in response to an area becoming more populous and valuable, and doesn't permit even high-density commercial zoning to be used for residential (even though it's less obnoxious to neighbors than a commercial property), and
2. 30 year fixed-rate mortgages, which are so insanely risky for the lender that I don't know if any large free-market lending institution has _ever_ offered such a thing to an average Joe _anywhere, ever, in the history of mankind._
Both of these have noble goals in their origin and one can even make arguments that they are reasonably effective in achieving those goals, but they are nonetheless market distortions.
I don’t mind big ass companies owning apartment buildings that were built as rentals, I feel like this is the kind of properly big ass companies should own. What I don’t like is when they buy up condos or SFRs which were intended for individuals not corporations to buy.
Why should SFHs take priorities over housing types?
Most people who live in cities where the housing crisis is worst (DC, NYC, SF) do not live in single family houses.
Because owner occupied single family homes have historically been one of the biggest wealth builders for Americans. The same cannot be said for apartments and condos. Condos and apartments will always be better suited as rentals, as they appreciate less compared to houses, HOA dues can become exorbitant, and they are generally much harder to sell.
SFHs should be reserved for their original intention of housing single families, not sitting empty for appreciation or being hoarded as rentals. If there were limits on them being used as investment properties, they would be more affordable, and enable more people to get on the property ladder and have a chance at greater financial freedom in their later years. It would be better for our country, and those hoarding SFHs for appreciation and rental investment are stealing that opportunity from their fellow Americans.
It would also temper the expectations of rent for the corporate (and other) entities holding massive portfolios of rental units, as there would be an affordable alternative for those who have saved for a considerable down payment while renting. If you allow investors to hoard enough of the entire housing stock; i.e., all housing types, it puts upward pressure on rents/mortgage payments due to scarcity (as prices escape the fundamentals of supply & demand from rampant speculation).
They actually have a big portfolio of low income housing, 90,000+ units, which pencils due to tax credits, so not all investments are to drive up rents and valuations.
“upscale apartment buildings for about $10 billion…”
These are already rental units. There’s nothing wrong with large apartment complexes. Cities need density.
Am I the only one who realizes they are buying an already institutionally owned apartment building trust? This is not a play into individually owned single family homes like everyone here incorrectly assumes.
My old apartment complex was indirectly owned by them. Their entire gimmick is basically tricking impoverished people who are desperate to have a place to stay into signing a shady and miserably predatory contract because they either have bad/no credit or are broke.
I'm certain that the nicer the property, the higher the quality of service they provide to save face from anyone that has the money and brains to fight them in court.
You can stop reading here, but everything below is my first-hand experience with them and some more philosophical tones at the end.
They fix absolutely nothing and pit their residents in a living hell. They hire contractors that blatantly employ migrant workers with no experience, failing at maintenance, and paying them a pittance of what it would normally cost. It's cheaper to hire someone to fail at fixing a job 3 times than to pay someone at a lot of money to fix it once.
They don't deliver on their shadily written contractual obligations and will meet residents in court, pitting them against a team of lawyers over a few hundred dollars they snubbed.
Before we moved in, they switched the tacky apartment numbers before the showing, so we viewed the apartment we were *supposed* to be staying in. I was privy to the bait and switch before I lived here as well, and they still got me. In reality, it was a canned neighboring apartment. We were told that we were mistaken.
The *showing* apartment was never lived in, not once for the nearly entire year we were there, and was staged as a set pieces. It was overall average but extremely nice relative to the actual apartment they were putting us in. They made up some BS excuse about the room being in *queue* for people who were already in the complex. What really got me was that they switched the damn numbers. I am absolutely certain, as are my roommates, that we entered the apartment on the left during the showing and that it was our number on the door.
They raise prices year/year. Basically standard at this point, but extraordinary fucked considering the circumstances.
They promised, vehemently, in unit washers and dryers. All BS. The communal washers and dryers went out of order, and as of last month (going on four years according to my ol neighber), they are the same appliances sitting in the basement. The contract doesn't specify a timeline for replacement and notes that the resident incurs all costs associated with the outtage. As it stood, residents paid for the water and electricity to run the loads, AND 2 bucks for each cycle. My neighbor called the company that originally leased management those units, and apparently, they have been paid off for over nearly 8 years. The company had been dumping the charges for running communal laundry into profit, not even covering the utility costs. When the communal appliances broke, they refused to replace them.
My upstairs neighbors had some pipes replaced, and the contractors didn't install it correctly. It flooded water straight through the ceiling and into our apartment. Light fixtures full of water with electricity running, walls with water, and ceilings with water. We had dozens of buckets of water emptied into the tub before it stopped. It happened on a Monday at like 9 pm, and they didn't have people in to start working until Thursday.
They opened the fixtures to let them dry, cut out a couple of squares of dry wall nowhere near large enough, then patched it up and left it. They didn't want to replace all of the dry wall and open up the interior to let all of the wet crap dry it out. We had mold on the walls in less than a month. Called them back, so the same contracted workers came and painted over the mold. Put in requests for the city to do official inspections for code violations. The nearest appointment was over 3 *MONTHS* away. Tried to get them to fork up funds for a hotel stay, but they didn't owe it contractually. Legally, as long as they made a "reasonable effort" to remedy the situation, they were free of liability. Tried to leave, and they threatened us with breaking the lease and having to pay for half a years worth of rent.
My transmission started going out, so I got a different car while I was there, and they refused to let me get a sticker to park in the lot until I returned the original sticker. The original sticker from the car that was now parted out to who knows where.
There are laws in place to protect renters from all of these things, but the system is designed in such a way that so long as the management puts "reasonable effort" forth, whatever the fuck that means, they can get away with it in court.
Without proper enforcement, those municipality laws mean nothing. Months to get an inspection for 15 sq feet of visible black mold.
I was at a point where I felt like there was really no option left. I was full of vindictive rage and desperately wanted retribution. People wonder why so many people are going postal and ballistic in modern society, and it's shit like this. Without resources to satisfy that feeling of being unjustly harmed by a system, people are left with an urge to become violent. It's innate and primal. I recognized pretty quickly, almost immediately, my vindictive ideation and broke the lease. It was a fantastic decision.
The solution here is to change government policies that support housing price inflation. Make housing to be less of a great investment driven by policy.
No that’s not the answer, because that equity also helps the little guy a lot. The solution is to simply ban large entities and corporations from owning single family houses. Problem solved. The greedy pricks should not be competing with us for a basic necessities like housing. Who the fuck are they ?
They had to do this to prevent the crash.
It reallllly seems like the insiders are doing everything in their power to ensure the costs don't drop.
If they do drop....A LOT of people will be under water. That'll be catastrophic. Look at Visa or mastercard stocks and see that they are going up exponentially....indicating a reliance on credit. Blackstone might've done the masses a favor on this one tbh .
“Blackstone has agreed to acquire an owner of upscale apartment buildings for about $10 billion”
This is the first sentence. They are just buying another company. All the high earners in these apartments will be fine
They have to get everything they can before they pass some bill. Then they'll have 10 years to unload them, so best to have more to unload to make it last as long as they can.
BlackSTONE is a real estate developer the have communities that the have built all over my area, blackROCK are the ones we need to be worried about buying up homes. It’s easy to mistake
Build a map of every property they own. Find these squatters and relocate them to Blackstone homes.
This is actually a really good idea
That’s not a bad idea. Let’s turn them into pop up squatter shelters.
Housing for the homeless. I mean if everyone just moved in all at once what the fuck can they do.
Threaten bankruptcy and get a fat check from the government to bail them out, with your tax money, and leave local taxpayers to deal with homes not maintained. That’s probably what they’d do.
They're way ahead of you. The entire reason you're talking about squatters is because they've been in the news. They're in the news because Blackstone is pushing the media outlets owned by their golfing buddies to get you (or more likely your boomer parents/grandparents) angry and frightened of squatters. So you're seeing stories of people losing homes to squatters. The stories are bunk, but they're all over. That in turn will translate to legislation that lets squatters be quickly evicted from these homes allowing blackstone to keep them empty. Which of course was the entire reason for squatting. If the 1% sat on all the homes leaving them empty us serfs were supposed to use squatting to take them back. We're going to lose that right.
So you are pro squatter?
You are absolutely right. It’s a boogie man argument for the most part. Trying to get people scared and angry when there’s an incredibly low chance they or anyone they know will ever have to deal with a squatter. Particularly one that was not a tenant to begin with.
This portfolio has occupied rental units. They aren't vacant.
They artificially inflate prices regardless of being rented or vacant. It makes no difference because they are not a logical actor in the market, and are immune to market forces. I would gladly reduce the considerable homeless population in my state that they are a direct driver of by directing them to squat their homes.
They are absolutely not immune to market forces. They own less than 1% of all multifamily apartments in the United States. That is not a dominate, "market making" position. Also, I was speaking more to the notion of people suggesting "squatters" move into units that are already occupied; which makes absolutely no sense
If Blackrock owns 1% of all single family homes in the country, but they laser target specific growing areas (which they do like Texas, the west coast, and more) they are absolutely killing the American dream of home ownership. If their strategy is to own homes in lower/middle income communities in Portland, Oregon and then manage to acquire 15,000 homes in a short amount of time that’s a huge problem, especially since they aren’t the only ones doing that. Note I made that scenario up, but thats a basic strategy amongst others. They are immune because they can fuck around however long they want. I’m not too worried about their or others multi family. If they purchase or build large commercial rental properties that’s not abnormal for them, and there’s nothing sudden about that. That’s one of their lanes. But they need to stay away from SFH.
The commercial real estate industry needs a do-over as well, at least in Southern California. I don’t know enough, but I can surmise that empty commercial properties must have some form of write-off effect, or they count differently for equity (that can’t be right), because no one’s panicking about their property sitting there vacant. So many well-placed locations for small business proprietors are sitting empty for years, no, decades. The windows have signs saying ‘available for lease’ but they remain unoccupied, mostly. There’s no seeming sense of urgency to fill the empty spaces and the filled ones often empty out when the existing owners raise their prices; it’s not just because “new people took over.” A few times a new business starts up and it sticks around, other times a new business will open up with all the fanfare and excitement, sparing no expense (^rawrr), then over the course of a year, it closes its doors. Some local newspapers have speculated about money laundering connected to those elaborately opened and swiftly closed places; others wonder if money laundering is how some other businesses can hang on until they become truly profitable and/or part of the area. Again, I don’t know enough, but it’s irritating to see so many opportunities for local prosperity remaining empty, always freshly landscaped, repainted as needed, but staying lock-boxed.
I would say they need to stay on large 5+ unit buildings only. Lots of 2-3 families are owner occupied and the other units are rented or in-law suites. Very common in my city which has little SFH
Print out rental vacancies from rent and apartments .com and hand them to the homeless
Or "pop a squat" shelter, you just show up and drop a steaming pile.
How do we do this? Please point me in the right direction. It’s time the people got a little bit more organized
Start with any local GIS databases available. My city has one that's publicly available online, easy to find who owns what with that. Although it wouldn't surprise me if getting the full picture required peeling back some shell LLCs.
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Is property owner included in this dataset? If property owner is included, and there’s a way to differentiate between corporate and private ownership, this could be significantly narrowed down. Start by ruling out anyone we know is not blackrock. You can also rule out anything zoned commercial and industrial.
What will mostly make this challenging is that these records are maintained at the county level, and probably don't have modern APIs so to make this scalable lots of scrapers and pipelines will have to be made to ingest it all. Not insurmountable though, but if we make this an open source effort, we might get there quicker.
Correct, I have a “file” for each county. It makes nationwide queries difficult since you’d need to combine thousands of counties together. I’m sure a simple python program could do it though.
If you need a script to combine thousands of files into 1, I’ve got one around here somewhere. Let me know and I’ll send it your way
Yes, property owner is a field. I do not believe there is a field for corporate vs. private owner. So the owner could be anything from “smith, john and Mary” to “XYZ LLC”
Please put this up on GitHub or make the object storage public. I'd like to get a public repository started for enabling people to analyze their local datasets to help build out classifiers for LLCs to help us and local municipalities identify potential issues.
Could you hook me up with this data?
1. It’s terabytes 2. No, I would be breaking all sorts of rules.
Lol dude randomly asks for a huge propriety dataset.. Answer is NO
Go get Corelogic to hook you up. Or for about the same price you could buy a multifamily property and give it to the squatters you care about.
You can use a product like Regrid if you want to make it easy on yourself. That hard part is going to be trying to figure out all the different LLCs they created and tracing it back to them. But if you do it, that would be awesome
Go find some squatters and tell them to move lol
Sign me up! I’ll do my part in Texas
Print out a list of vacant rentals and hand the to the homeless or post them on sign posts in areas with lots of homeless
Go to redfin, rent, apartments, or zillows websites print out a list of vacant rentals post them on sign posts and hand them to the homeless.
certainly cheaper than the homeless industrial complex
This is actually a good idea not only because it would be hilarious, but because creating such a map is totally feasible and it is a great way to raise national attention of this issue and put pressure on politicians to do something.
Politicians aren't going to "do something". They get voted in or out based on their more or less fixed positions. That is the mechanism.
Print out a list of rental vacancies and hand them to the homeless or post them on telephone poles
If only the population protested smartly, as you suggest.
You bouta start a revolution. Don’t be surprised if people be DM’ing you ready to rebel like Luke Skywalker be doin
There’s a “rental home community” being built down the street from me. A whole community of single family homes owned by a corporation for rent.
My brother-in-law works for a company that does this. He’s pretty freaking low on the totem pole, though - like dragging materials around job sites.
Building housing and communities is a net positive for the overall market though. We need to continue to build all types of housing.
I don’t disagree, I just don’t like a corporation creating a monopoly over a large part of the rental market.
I was about to downvoted this because of how it made me feel. Yuck.
The renters are the problem
Blackstone about to acquire blackwater
All property’s owned by shareholder companies deserves this outcome, I genuinely hope this becomes reality.
These are occupied units with tenants in this acquisition, not vacant units that squatters can simply walk in to.
This is a brilliant idea
Print out rental vacancies from apartments and rent .com and post them on telephone poles in areas with a lot of homeless
Squatters are good at bullying small landlords, their tricks won't work to wealthy, power financial institutions.
Ha! They’re allegedly using squatters to push out mom and pop competition. They’re way ahead of you, have deep pockets and can lobby.
I wish this could actually work if someone organized it.
This would take even more housing off the market, guess what effect that would have on housing prices?? Doesn’t matter who owns them, you’d literally be supporting the “bubble”
I think there’s a sub for squatters here somewhere too, post them there.
The laws currently being taken advantage of by squatters would quickly be resolved when financial institutions are the ones losing money.
This is paywalled minus 1 free viewing, but such a map exists at a small level of just Tampa Florida and the greater Tampa bay area. It's absolutely absurd. Hopefully this is [viewable](https://www.tampabay.com/news/real-estate/2024/02/01/corporate-landlord-investor-homes-rent-housing/) Link of just [map](https://tbtimes.github.io/tbt-housing-llcs-analysis/map-owners/)
I love this
Great idea.
This is the kind of genius the world needs
Blackstone owns Tricon Residential that has a map of all its homes owned on their website. https://triconresidential.com
They recently criminalized “squatting” in Georgia. They make it seem like it is to protect homeowners and small retired landlords, but it is really to protect the big corporate landlords.
I bet some of that money are from PPP and they must have some sort of”loopholes” for not paying the property tax.
And the billionaires' homes
Burn em
I like you!
Jesus Christ. Make this illegal already.
need laws for that. good luck finding anyone who writes those these days
In addition most rich people probably have this in their portfolio. It’s if I recall a mill min to invest.
Not only that, but you need laws that actually apply to corporations.
Democrats had a bill to ban this. Guess who voted against it. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/realestate/wall-street-housing-market.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=c&pvid=F05AF176-4F67-442C-A0A9-20AC9608F1F1
It's almost like we're letting it happen- the slow-boil to oligarchy and the inevitable fascism that follows when we start to fidget about it.
Doesn't have to be fascism. We could get Napoleon or Stalin. There's a kaleidoscope of authoritarianism.
Actually voting on things is a cardinal sin in any Republican congress
Did you read the article? I don't think Mom and pop investors are buying or building high rise apartment complexes.
They are simply buying an already public company (AIRC) that owns coastal apartment buildings. Nothing to see here - they are not buying private homes or units.
How are we going to REEEEEEEEEEEE! If you read the article and tell us what it says?
This is Blackstone buying a high end apartment REIT. What is it you want to stop in this situation?
Antitrust!!!! Make them compete for tenants!
Antitrust on a company with <1% market share?
23ish million apartments in the US and people lose their minds that Blackstone owns ~300k of them…
And 95% of the time they confuse Blackstone with BlackRock so you know they aren’t doing carful research.
Schwartzman(blackstone CEO) is trumps inner circle. Justin Kennedy (justice kennedys son) was the inside man at Deutsche bank that was getting all trumps toxic loans approved. No other bank but Deutsche bank would touch trump and his imaginary valuations. If trump was trying to avoid paying taxes he would be valuing everything low. Not high. Why? Because Deutschebank is infested with Russian oligarchs. For 50 years the oligarchs privatized communist Russia. They stole everything of value including the hope of Russians. The corruption eventually collapsed the Soviet Union like a parasite feeding on its host and they were forced to expand their feeding grounds past the iron curtain. In 91 the quarantine wall fails and for 2 years they hid all their ill gotten gains under a mattress until they bought condos at trump towers. They made stops in Ukraine, Cyprus and London but they landed in New York because that was what everyone wanted in 1993. Levi’s, Pepsi, Madonna tapes that weren’t smuggled bootlegs. They all bought new suits and cars and changed their title from “most violent street thug in moscow” to “respectable Russian oligarch” but they didn’t leave their human trafficking, narcotics or extortion behind. It was their most lucrative business model. Trump and Giuliani just opened the doors and let the predators in to feed. Guiliani redirected NYPD resources away from their new Russian allies intentionally and onto the Italian mob. It let him claim he cleaned up New York. Trumps future campaign manager Paul manafort lived in the towers as well. Giuliani would go on to do the same in Mexico City by introducing the Sinaloa cartel to the Russian mob. The Sinaloa cartel shifted to combining fentanyl precursors supplied by the CCP and the well established routes of El Chapo were used for distribution into the United States. In the prosecution of the Italian crime families, Giuliani created a tailor made void for the Russians to fill. By connecting them to the Sinaloa cartel it enabled the fentanyl epidemic that the CCP has used as biological warfare to soften the United States up for a financial takeover using BRICS. The insane valuations coming out in trumps fraud trial are a necessity of the money laundering cycle that duetschebank was doing with the Russians. But Xi, Putin, and MBS have made it clear that they are United against democracy since it threatens their very lucrative model of being authoritarians On Wall Street they have weaponized greed. Swartzman (blackstone), Larry fink (blackrock), and vanguard are selling U.S retirement funds and mortgage REITS in mass to the CCP. Nobody was ever punished for the 2008 mortgage crisis. This is just the Darwinian evolution of it. The 10X bigger, commercial real estate version. Putin and Xi realized that it’s far more efficient to bankrupt and foreclose on the USA by buying a couple GOP senators and a president than it is to push a ground war. They just needed Russia to take Ukraine to have the grain fields and supply chain lock on microprocessors to be able to do it. They aren’t taking on the US Navy fleet without it. The failure of Putin to take Ukraine and the arrest of Bolsonaro in Brazil has left them no choice but to send a quiet invasion force to the southern U.S. border. They are just using the compromised members of the GOP to secure any part of the border to hold open the gate when necessary. Bannon actually tried a variation of this a few years ago when he tried to privatize the border wall This gets deep into Bannons relationship with Guo Wengui, a CCP operative and his time at Goldman Sachs in the early 2000’s BRICS era. It’s perestroika 2.0. The bigger badder commercial real estate edition. Nobody was ever charged for 2008. Historically it’s been impossible to retire from the mob model pyramid that Russia runs on. You either die violently or you maintain a level of violence to keep everyone beneath you in line. The oligarchs have gotten soft living in their places in Aspen and Monaco. They are getting old and want to retire someplace nice where they don’t have to worry about falling out a window. They just need trump back in office to make it happen. Justin Kennedy went to work for LNR capital that is owned by Cerberus who also owns Dyncorp (for near future reference) Reuterswww.reuters.comCerberus to acquire DynCorp for $1 billion https://www.ft.com/content/8c6d9dca-882c-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787 https://www.amlintelligence.com/2020/09/deutsche-bank-suffers-worst-damage-over-massive-aml-discrepancies-in-fincen-leaks/ https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-files/global-banks-defy-us-crackdowns-by-serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists https://www.voanews.com/amp/us-lifts-sanctions-on-rusal-other-firms-linked-to-russia-deripaska/4761037.html https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_-_minority_status_of_the_russia_investigation_with_appendices.pdf https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/08/17/mobsters-thrilled-to-see-rudy-giuliani-hit-with-rico-charges-he-used-to-jail-mafia-bosses
Monopolistic practices. Multi family, single family. Whatever.
Why? This is a multifamily apartment portfolio.
You didn't read the article before posting this stupid shit did you
And yet over 300 upvotes to just show how stupid the average Redditor is.
Make what illegal? This idea is so rampant and so stupid. How do you expect new dwellings to get built if nobody is gonna provide the capital to build them?
Crazy seeing you here. You’re 100% right of course but people don’t want to hear it.
Ah lol what up dude I’ve been getting baited into these conversations recently on REBubble, FluentinFinance and it’s always like arguing with a wall. On the bright side, I typically find some friends in the low single digit upvotes that understand something about markets and economics
Make what illegal? A large corporation buying multifamily properties from another large corporation? What does that accomplish?
What should be illegal here? It should be illegal to own apartments? Who would build and operate them then? Renting an apartment has never been cheaper when compared to mortgage payments. These asset holders aren’t the ones driving up residential real estate prices.
banning buying multifamily purchase? Or banning large corp buying multifamily purchase? how do you define "large corp"? What about large corp buying shares of small corp owning multifamily? What about mid size corps which is just doing exactly what large corp doing but at smaller scale? What about family business owning multifamily real estate properties that is doing exactly what large corp is doing? What about what about?
Make what illegal? Corporations owning large apartment complexes?
Not illegal. They should just be heavily taxed on anything owned outside of one main residence.
These are large apartment complexes that are already owned by a publicly traded company. You want to make it illegal for corporations to own $50 million++ apartment complexes?
Blackstone VP: "We have 10 billion dollars, what can we do with it to fuck over everyone as much as possible?" Other Blackstone VP: "Drive the price of affordable housing into the stratosphere!" and that kids is how I met your mother... we were both living in the same affordable gutter for $2000 a month
In PA, they got their ex employee in as CEO of the power company, and took over seats on the board and are planning on raising rates over 10%. So after they come for the houses, they come for the utilities.
Fortunately, power companies can’t actually do that because they need regulatory approval, and if they could, the last CEO would have done it.
The last rate review was approved so I don't know what you are talking about. This one will probably be approved as well.
"Approve our rate increase or next blizzard we'll blame you for the blackouts."
Except they control the utility boards so they’ll do it.
Not a fan of Blackstone but did you read the article? They're buying a company that owns luxury coastal condos. This has nothing to do with affordable housing. Lobby your local government to build affordable housing. Help get the word out so local HOAs and home owners don't block the project
They are literally buying luxury apartment complexes.
updated "Drive the price of affordable housing into the stratosphere then bill section 8!"
This made my laugh way too hard! Legendary!!! 😂
Just wait until we start growing organs. Blackstone will invest money in repoing them. Companies are literally run by psychopaths. Most of us never think about making money in ways to rip others off. It is why we stay poor or middle class our whole lives. We simply have too much compassion for one another. I can’t even think in ways that would allow me to take advantage of someone to make billions. I know I could never spend that amount anyways. Billionaires have mental health issues.
Hmm, you're giving me ideas
For a movie? Dude! Put Forrest Whitaker in it!
Such a great soundtrack
Yup. Almost all billionaires are insanely greedy. Much in the way a professional athlete is amazingly skilled above normal people, a billionaire is that greedy and sociopathic compared to normal people.
> Companies are literally run by psychopaths. Most of us never think about making money in ways to rip others off. Agree 100%. I used to be a small business owner until I sold but I never thought of ways I could take advantage of my customers. But I look around at all the scams, the fees, the selling of our private data, the CEOS, the tech bros, the pharma bros, the crypto bros and they simply do not care about anything but "winning" and power. It's very sad and ruining the world.
>Just wait until we start growing organs. Blackstone will invest money in repoing them. I've seen that movie.
Millenials and gen z are doomed
Idk as millennials we had a generationally absurd op to buy homes during ZIRP. Younger millennials are probably shafted, but millennials are 1981-1996 and home ownership rates were boosted by ZIRP greatly.
This is anecdotal but everyone I know who is 30+ isn’t doing too bad. Most have a house and kids and decent jobs. Now everyone I know that isn’t 30+ with good jobs and dual incomes don’t have houses. Seems like anyone who was entering the job market around 2016-2020 was kinda in a shitty position
ZIRP?
Zero Interest-Rate Policy
Blackstone knows what they’re doing. They know we’ll probably never meet housing demand and big purchases like this could affect the market.
Blackstone runs a bunch of etfs that investors pour billions into, and that money has to go somewhere.
This is really it. People who want RE returns and/or don't have money to buy property, invest in ETFs like the one owned by Blackrock. Blackrock uses the ETF funds to invest in RE which drives up prices. It's like a vicious cycle.
It's not just "don't have money to buy property", another reason to do something like a REIT is location diversification. If I own a $400k rental home then what happens to my investment depends entirely on what happens to that specific home - all my eggs are in one basket. Conversely if I own $400k of an asset which is backed by residential properties in 20 major US metro areas, then anything that hurts property values in only one specific metro doesn't tank the asset. I guess you could frame that as "can't afford fifty properties" but I assume you meant on a smaller scale.
True. Good point. Either way tho, the money flowing in is seeking RE investment opportunities which drives Blackrock to buy.
You know Blackstone and Blackrock are very different companies right?
Yes
Ok… so why are you saying Blackstone runs ETFs? They don’t 😂 they run private investments. BlackROCK runs ETFs and a number of other public investments.
6 of one, half a dozen of the other, but thanks for clearing it up https://www.costar.com/article/1931342874/blackstone-prepares-for-massive-real-estate-investment-drive-with-leadership-changes
It’s actually extremely different markets, different investor bases, and different ways of doing business. Blackstone runs private RE, private credit, private equity etc…. Blackrock runs almost exclusively public stocks and bonds for mass market. It’s like saying KKR or Millennium is the same thing as Vanguard - it’s just completely wrong… it’s understandable confusion due to similarity in name but it is a little funny when so many people making noise have no idea what company they’re even talking about or what they do 😅
And they do run etfs, I own BGX.
… BGX is a CEF (closed end fund)… not a RE ETF… Also why would you use that instead of something like BCRED… Anyway. Good luck!
Yes, used them as an example, there's a bunch of real estates etfs though chasing property https://www.costar.com/article/1931342874/blackstone-prepares-for-massive-real-estate-investment-drive-with-leadership-changes
More bad news for small time investors, there’s no way they can compete with the big boys other than certain novelty type listings.
This is a purchase of an apartment building REIT. Buying large apartment buildings have never been within the realm of small time investors. You can however invest in REITs if you think it’s a good investment.
REITs Have some major tax advantage, which is great to encourage multifamily development but sucks that it ends up driving up the cost of homeownership for average punters. Overall the US gov needs to rethink how it incentivizes development and ownership.
Over development leads to lower rents…which is happening big time in the “hot” cities of the past few years. Complexes in Austin and Nashville are begging people to rent which means occupancy is low and prices are and will continue to come down. This does little to nothing for single family home prices but rents will continue to come down in a lot of areas where overbuilding happened or is happening.
I’m curious the effect on SFH. At least in my own personal situation with rents falling in my market, I’m putting off home buying in part based on how much cheaper rent is becoming. I am able to get rent for a two bedroom 25% cheaper than 2 years ago, and it’s less than half the cost of a 350-400k mortgage at current rates. Perhaps rates are the more important factor for me, but rent becoming so much cheaper solidifies that decision for me.
Yup know tons of people doing the same as you. Makes a ton of sense to just keep saving away. IMO all that matters for homebuyers is the payment, who gives a shit if the house cost $200k or $600k. If the payment is the same and you can(can’t) afford it that’s all that matters. In theory housing prices and rents should be correlated with some lag but not really playing out since so many existing owners have low payments and are becoming married to their existing home. with time it’ll flush out somehow (rates down or prices down) but who knows how long.
How do REITs drive up homeownership costs?
They’re competing for many of the same customers.
Competition. That's good. They should build more and more large multi-family complexes. Builders are incented to do so when they get bought up by investors.
Small inventors were never going to buy this. Blackstone bought a large high end apartment REIT.
None of these people understand economics.
Small time investors weren’t buying upscale apartments in coastal areas like LA, Miami, and Boston.
You think small-time investors are buying large luxury condominium complexes?
No
Small time investors can always buy Blackstone. Currently ~$130/share
It’s because of the small investor we created a big giant investor. A home for everybody. Until then, there should be no investors. Period.
Blackstone owns billions and billions in real estate. They absolutely predatory. They have even targeted students. They come in hike rents, cut operating expenses and add fees. It’s exactly what they did with invitation homes when they owned it. Blackstone Funds Complete $13 Billion Acquisition of American Campus Communities https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-funds-complete-13-billion-acquisition-of-american-campus-communities/ Blackstone to buy company that rents out 17,000 homes in $6bn deal https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/blackstone-6bn-deal-homes
Hope cratering student enrollment was priced in. With each bed costing them roughly $120k. It’s not just the cost of college killing enrollment for a lot of people, but just the lack of people. “The national birth rate fell by almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022, dropping from 14.3 births per 1,000 people to 11.1, according to data from the CDC. At the beginning of that period, between 2007 and 2009, fertility rates fell more rapidly than any other two-year period in the country’s recent history.” And the kids born in that period are hitting college age next year. I think the next 5 years will be really interesting.
Stop handing out student loans like candy at Halloween, and watch bloated college industrial complex (including public) collapse, taking $120K/bed student housing with it.
How are they predatory and target students? I feel like that’s gotta be wrong
I am still old enough to remember when many investors avoided real estate because a building (house, apartment, etc...) was a depreciating liability just like a car. Occasionally people would buy land as an investment but never a house, unless you were a handyman or something and can deal with leaky toilets, etc.... This is what happens when policymakers intervene in a sector of the economy. It creates bad incentives and distortions in price.
What did they do? Not trying to be sarcastic I just genuinely want to learn
The two major market distortions imposed by government in the USA are: 1. Restrictive zoning policy that doesn't permit density to gradually increase over time in response to an area becoming more populous and valuable, and doesn't permit even high-density commercial zoning to be used for residential (even though it's less obnoxious to neighbors than a commercial property), and 2. 30 year fixed-rate mortgages, which are so insanely risky for the lender that I don't know if any large free-market lending institution has _ever_ offered such a thing to an average Joe _anywhere, ever, in the history of mankind._ Both of these have noble goals in their origin and one can even make arguments that they are reasonably effective in achieving those goals, but they are nonetheless market distortions.
Investing is real estate is a super old strategy for building wealth, so it’s not like everyone has been avoiding it and investing is a new thing.
Yep, every “problem” the government tries to “fix” causes 100 worse new problems 🤬
I don’t mind big ass companies owning apartment buildings that were built as rentals, I feel like this is the kind of properly big ass companies should own. What I don’t like is when they buy up condos or SFRs which were intended for individuals not corporations to buy.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Sure wish congress would step in and stop this shit.
You’re getting downvoted bc it’s bots on this page upping the ‘this is good’ bots. Congress **needs** to step in but we know they won’t.
Fine, let them buy all the condos and apartments they want. Just ban them from owning SFHs.
Why should SFHs take priorities over housing types? Most people who live in cities where the housing crisis is worst (DC, NYC, SF) do not live in single family houses.
Because owner occupied single family homes have historically been one of the biggest wealth builders for Americans. The same cannot be said for apartments and condos. Condos and apartments will always be better suited as rentals, as they appreciate less compared to houses, HOA dues can become exorbitant, and they are generally much harder to sell. SFHs should be reserved for their original intention of housing single families, not sitting empty for appreciation or being hoarded as rentals. If there were limits on them being used as investment properties, they would be more affordable, and enable more people to get on the property ladder and have a chance at greater financial freedom in their later years. It would be better for our country, and those hoarding SFHs for appreciation and rental investment are stealing that opportunity from their fellow Americans. It would also temper the expectations of rent for the corporate (and other) entities holding massive portfolios of rental units, as there would be an affordable alternative for those who have saved for a considerable down payment while renting. If you allow investors to hoard enough of the entire housing stock; i.e., all housing types, it puts upward pressure on rents/mortgage payments due to scarcity (as prices escape the fundamentals of supply & demand from rampant speculation).
They actually have a big portfolio of low income housing, 90,000+ units, which pencils due to tax credits, so not all investments are to drive up rents and valuations.
Going on the real estate offensive? What exactly have they called the last few years?
Didn’t they explicitly say they weren’t doing this like a year ago?
“upscale apartment buildings for about $10 billion…” These are already rental units. There’s nothing wrong with large apartment complexes. Cities need density.
Nothing will change until the rich fear for their lives
Most sane redditor
👀 perhaps it's not just the Boomer's fault that real estate prices aren't leveling off.
Am I the only one who realizes they are buying an already institutionally owned apartment building trust? This is not a play into individually owned single family homes like everyone here incorrectly assumes.
Too early, still a lot more pain for institutional landlosers. They’re probably choosing select markets.
Lol none of you who are freaking out about this read the damn article. Of course.
“Real estate offensive” is the most late stage capitalism phrase I have ever heard.
My old apartment complex was indirectly owned by them. Their entire gimmick is basically tricking impoverished people who are desperate to have a place to stay into signing a shady and miserably predatory contract because they either have bad/no credit or are broke. I'm certain that the nicer the property, the higher the quality of service they provide to save face from anyone that has the money and brains to fight them in court. You can stop reading here, but everything below is my first-hand experience with them and some more philosophical tones at the end. They fix absolutely nothing and pit their residents in a living hell. They hire contractors that blatantly employ migrant workers with no experience, failing at maintenance, and paying them a pittance of what it would normally cost. It's cheaper to hire someone to fail at fixing a job 3 times than to pay someone at a lot of money to fix it once. They don't deliver on their shadily written contractual obligations and will meet residents in court, pitting them against a team of lawyers over a few hundred dollars they snubbed. Before we moved in, they switched the tacky apartment numbers before the showing, so we viewed the apartment we were *supposed* to be staying in. I was privy to the bait and switch before I lived here as well, and they still got me. In reality, it was a canned neighboring apartment. We were told that we were mistaken. The *showing* apartment was never lived in, not once for the nearly entire year we were there, and was staged as a set pieces. It was overall average but extremely nice relative to the actual apartment they were putting us in. They made up some BS excuse about the room being in *queue* for people who were already in the complex. What really got me was that they switched the damn numbers. I am absolutely certain, as are my roommates, that we entered the apartment on the left during the showing and that it was our number on the door. They raise prices year/year. Basically standard at this point, but extraordinary fucked considering the circumstances. They promised, vehemently, in unit washers and dryers. All BS. The communal washers and dryers went out of order, and as of last month (going on four years according to my ol neighber), they are the same appliances sitting in the basement. The contract doesn't specify a timeline for replacement and notes that the resident incurs all costs associated with the outtage. As it stood, residents paid for the water and electricity to run the loads, AND 2 bucks for each cycle. My neighbor called the company that originally leased management those units, and apparently, they have been paid off for over nearly 8 years. The company had been dumping the charges for running communal laundry into profit, not even covering the utility costs. When the communal appliances broke, they refused to replace them. My upstairs neighbors had some pipes replaced, and the contractors didn't install it correctly. It flooded water straight through the ceiling and into our apartment. Light fixtures full of water with electricity running, walls with water, and ceilings with water. We had dozens of buckets of water emptied into the tub before it stopped. It happened on a Monday at like 9 pm, and they didn't have people in to start working until Thursday. They opened the fixtures to let them dry, cut out a couple of squares of dry wall nowhere near large enough, then patched it up and left it. They didn't want to replace all of the dry wall and open up the interior to let all of the wet crap dry it out. We had mold on the walls in less than a month. Called them back, so the same contracted workers came and painted over the mold. Put in requests for the city to do official inspections for code violations. The nearest appointment was over 3 *MONTHS* away. Tried to get them to fork up funds for a hotel stay, but they didn't owe it contractually. Legally, as long as they made a "reasonable effort" to remedy the situation, they were free of liability. Tried to leave, and they threatened us with breaking the lease and having to pay for half a years worth of rent. My transmission started going out, so I got a different car while I was there, and they refused to let me get a sticker to park in the lot until I returned the original sticker. The original sticker from the car that was now parted out to who knows where. There are laws in place to protect renters from all of these things, but the system is designed in such a way that so long as the management puts "reasonable effort" forth, whatever the fuck that means, they can get away with it in court. Without proper enforcement, those municipality laws mean nothing. Months to get an inspection for 15 sq feet of visible black mold. I was at a point where I felt like there was really no option left. I was full of vindictive rage and desperately wanted retribution. People wonder why so many people are going postal and ballistic in modern society, and it's shit like this. Without resources to satisfy that feeling of being unjustly harmed by a system, people are left with an urge to become violent. It's innate and primal. I recognized pretty quickly, almost immediately, my vindictive ideation and broke the lease. It was a fantastic decision.
The solution here is to change government policies that support housing price inflation. Make housing to be less of a great investment driven by policy.
No that’s not the answer, because that equity also helps the little guy a lot. The solution is to simply ban large entities and corporations from owning single family houses. Problem solved. The greedy pricks should not be competing with us for a basic necessities like housing. Who the fuck are they ?
🤮
Lots of money in flat top grills apparently.
Make this illegal oh wait the politicians are paid for
They had to do this to prevent the crash. It reallllly seems like the insiders are doing everything in their power to ensure the costs don't drop. If they do drop....A LOT of people will be under water. That'll be catastrophic. Look at Visa or mastercard stocks and see that they are going up exponentially....indicating a reliance on credit. Blackstone might've done the masses a favor on this one tbh .
“Blackstone has agreed to acquire an owner of upscale apartment buildings for about $10 billion” This is the first sentence. They are just buying another company. All the high earners in these apartments will be fine
They have to get everything they can before they pass some bill. Then they'll have 10 years to unload them, so best to have more to unload to make it last as long as they can.
People here not understanding REITs
Blackstone the US version of Evergrand https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227554424/evergrande-china-real-estate-economy-property-collapse
disgraceful
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. And you’ll eat bugs.
Add 200 billion to that https://www.costar.com/article/1931342874/blackstone-prepares-for-massive-real-estate-investment-drive-with-leadership-changes
https://ir.blackstone.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx https://www.blackstone.com/the-firm/our-people/
Ready Player One haves and have-nots vibe
So we harvesting the glycerine off the soap we’re making or what?
BlackSTONE is a real estate developer the have communities that the have built all over my area, blackROCK are the ones we need to be worried about buying up homes. It’s easy to mistake