The national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too.
Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
In the past few years I’ve been involved in 7 real estate transactions in California, and haven’t seen a single “all cash offer from investors” on any of them.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, but it’s almost always from people who have never actually been involved in selling a home, or are shopping for a home way out of their price range and were going to get outbid anyway.
That's surprising given the data. Were these transactions recent? Investors focus on entry-level properties, so if you're buying above that tier you'd see less competition. But California overall has high investor activity:
“In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.”
OK, well are the economics in those markets worse than similar markets with lower levels of PE ownership of homes? Is there a correlation there that we can see in the data? Because otherwise stats from a couple moderate sized cities doesn’t seem that relevant to the nation as a whole.
Owning 1 in 9 "rental" homes means they own less than 1% of all homes.
You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.
PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
I don't generally agree, i think they should be able to buy them as well. We can't limit how many homes people own, how do you rent then? What do we classify as "too much" house ownership? 10?100?1000?
A mom and pop landlord with 5 rentals doesn't have pricing power. A firm owning 1 in 5 homes in a neighborhood does. That's why antitrust thresholds exist in other industries.
Owner-builder rather than for sale. By doing that, I was able to opt out of building codes, inspections, licensing, any building plans, and most the other horse shit that makes it so expensive.
Depends on where you live, but if you build for yourself it's a non-commercial activity which can drop off a lot of red tape. Cost me only ~60k to build a house last year by doing everything myself. I did have to sign an affidavit promising not to sell it in X time to get the county to issue a permit like that.
Most people can't build their own home (time, skills, land access, upfront capital for materials). It's like responding to “healthcare is too expensive” with “I just treated my own broken arm”.
Most people can actually; for awhile most families did. The thing stopping them is largely the state. I got my land for "a song" post COVID when home prices were already insane. Near lots of jobs too. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to build it for about 1/4 the cost of what anything around me costs. It did cost me 60k, but for 30k (the price of a newish car, which you see even in many section 8 / welfare areas, so accessible even sometimes to the 'lower' class) you could easily finish out a 200 sq ft shed with a plumbed haul water cistern, minimal solar, a wood stove, and a simple waste treatment system. Then as you have more money, expand. You don't even have to have all the money at one time; many families in latin america or SEA just buy blocks as money allows and slowly build over time (masonry construction more forgiving of this).
I've even found land for <100k in places like San Francisco that is enough to drop a shipping container on, but of course the fascists won't let you, better to be homeless and shit hepatitis into the street than have an unpermitted shipping container and bury some 50 gallon drums and drain field DIY septic system.
1) Google 'opt out' or 'no permit' 'no codes' counties in USA.
2) Watched basically every video by larry haun and read his book (the entire theory to build structure of a house is explained in ~3 hours, but I think I watched it 5 or 8 times)
3) Looked at simple cabin / small home plans
There are a couple civil engineering 'saints' that visit some of the cabin and small home forums online. I won't reveal who they are. They pop up randomly and intermittently and tend to not respond unless people are actually in the middle of a home build because there are always a gazillion people that are 'going to do it' but then never do and waste everyone's time with questions. I ran through a lot of my roof structure through them because the IRC is quite sparse on roof design and wind load capacities. I also have a friend that is a civil engineer and ran things through them a lot, although in the end following the examples by larry haun and the IRC he did not recommend much different.
I basically just followed IRC design to frame a simple rectangular house with gable roof. This is about the easiest house to frame, other than one with a shed roof. I would recommend 16' max width because the lumber is much easier to get and then you can use a perimeter foundation as your only foundational load bearing points. But you can get away with 20' wide if you have the means to find and haul it, otherwise you're dealing with a more complex foundation or engineered joists.
I've also seen success with friends finishing out shipping containers. In that case you may be able to just build piers with sonotubes, drop a shipping container, frame the inside (all non-structural, so if you fuck it up not a huge deal), then use the inside framing to build like a conventional wooden home (except you will need an insulation that does not need to breath). The caveat here is that if you want any windows or doors other than the one already part of it, you will need to know how to weld and cut steel.
