“The single-family rental market was very opaque, because the ownership was so fragmented,” Desiree Fields, an associate professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote the Automated Landlord paper, told Motherboard. “Because of that, it was impossible to do things like securitization or real estate investment trusts”—the complex financial instruments that Wall Street uses to extract money from investments.
They’re instruments that enable Wall Street to put money into investments.
Well, if they’re investments, there had better be a way to get money out as well. Otherwise they’re not very good investments, are they?
Perhaps Desiree Fields should talk to people who run housing associations and Reits rather than Richard Murphy.
Doesn’t more money actually come out of REITs than just goes in?
Doesn’t more money actually come out of REITs than just goes in?
They pay high dividends if that’s what you mean, which is one of the reasons why they have been so successful in the US and now worldwide.
The article, wearyingly long as always, is a big pile of “so what?” Investors are buying houses and then renting them out. No one interviewed appears to have been inconvenienced by renting from these companies and they cannot present a whiff of evidence that these companies are making prices rise in the markets where they operate.
The writer seems to think that phrases like “Wall Street-back landlord” will fill readers with fear and horror. Actually they probably do. Vice is a pile of shit but it must know its half-witted, hysterical audience.