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Home real estate markets should be driven by open supply and demand pricing and buying. However, when you have an institutional player buying units as a investments at a large number, easily out-positioning any individual buyer and groups of them in regional markets, then you have an artificial inflation of demand and reduction of supply. That jacks over the consumer buyer who is then victim to the same institutional player re-selling at higher demand levels, trickling out supply they have a partial monopoly over. Institutional buyers should only be allowed in the context of foreclosers and limited to selling at cost to recover their debt loss. Otherwise, it's like watching a soccer game where one team has the run of the field and the other has both legs tied to a cement block so they can't move more than a few feet at a time.

You are suggesting that the institutional buyers are able to achieve local monopolies in housing supply simply by buying up all the houses, but I don't think there's much evidence that that they've reached that level of market capture. If your concern is monopoly power I bet there are bigger fish to fry than institutional housing investors.

How can you convince me that there is something worse about this than a rich person outbidding you for a home that they intend to rent out, but which you intended to live in?

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Anyone buying anything is going to push up prices for someone else. Consumers are all in competition each other to buy scarce resources, just like sellers are also in competition with each other.

Why should the identity of who you're competing with matter? Why should a seller be prevented from entering into a voluntary contract with an institutional investor?

See also this for a response to some of the claims: https://jayparsons.beehiiv.com/p/top-11-myths-on-institutional-investors-of-single-family-homes

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That perspective is ignoring the impact of quantity buying to a regional market. If I buy 10 or 20 of something rare, it has a far greater market impact than you buying 1 unit in the same market. Again, basic supply and demand economics here.

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It's not ignoring the impact, it's just asking why we should ban legitimate economic activity based on the impact that it has (which is actually temporary, because if it was just a one-time surge in demand without persistent demand, eventually it'll be a money losing endeavor for those institutional investors)

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And it's not temporary, however. Bank of America and Wells Fargo are both sitting on $20 billion each in foreclosures and delinquency units. That doesn't happen momentarily; it happens over time. However, the banks have been under an industry moratorium to process foreclosures quickly. That's changing because their liability figures on the books are so big. Now, just imagine what happens to housing pricing when those foreclosures are unloaded competitively versus trickled out. And those two banks are not the only ones. They're just the biggest.

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