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Comment by sebhook | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see the "investors" segmented by assets under management (AUM). I'm sure some "investors" are mom and pop rental situations while other institutions, such as BlackRock, are purchasing single-family homes at scale.

I'll also be curious to see what happens when remodels need to happen. Many trade labor markets are hyper localized and difficult to scale across a property portfolio, this is where RedFin and Zillow struggled to "flip" effectively.

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> The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups.

Re: Zillow, it actually did well in the flipping business when relying on its models to make the buy decision. It got into trouble after tweaking the model to say "buy" on more (and more expensive) homes.

IIRC Zillow did "too well" to the point that they felt their model wasn't gauging the market correctly and was going to inevitably fail them spectacularly. The fact that it did well, better than it should have was just good luck... but also a bad sign because the model predicted a different outcome.

Aren't most mom-and-pop investors getting real estate exposure via their Blackrock holdings?

I believe GP is referring to "regular folks with jobs" who buy houses on the side to supplement their income (as opposed to investing in funds).

I understood this.

But there's been a general backlash on the internet the past few years about giant pools of money like Blackrock buying up housing supply. I don't think it's that different from your typical "mom and pop" real estate investor buying up homes to rent out. Ultimately, much of Blackrock's funds are held by regular mom-and-pop investors.

BlackRock, for all the flack it gets, ultimately is purchasing these homes on behalf of large institutional investors, like retirement plans, pensions, social security programs etc.

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