How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme—Again (2013, buying)

[french paris]

How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping.............................

[Malloric]

Leave it to Mother Jones to take a simple investment and spin it into something sinister. Rent/Buy was out of wack. Investors bought SFH for rentals. Most of them aren't being "flipped," and even if they were appreciation is no where near high enough for anything other than a good old-fashioned get rich slow scheme. They were generally bought with cash, not leveraged.

[John-UK]

This explains a lot:

[Hemlock140]

In those hard-hit areas it seems like this is a good thing, having people buy, fix up and rent out homes rather than having them sit empty and rot. In other areas like here and in the San Francisco Bay area, the rapid price increases are more real, with demand being greater than supply with many new workers coming into the area. Even in the 2009-10 years any distressed homes were more likely to be flipped than rented out here.