Corporate Landlords on the rise!

As a news article from Axios has pointed out, there are a variety of big corporations that are starting to come under the scrutiny of Congress. Why? Because companies like Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent and other investment firms seem to be buying up private property & single-family homes before planning to rent it out to consumers and expand their control over the single-family rental market! Axios also talks about Blackstone Group, which began scooping up tens of thousands of single-family homes in the aftermath of the 2009 subprime mortgage crisis.

One of my previous stories was about the rise of neofeudalism — a modernized version of feudalism where the middle class is weakened and rich corporations/oligarchs own most — if not all — property & control the rest of the population as serfs similar to the feudal system of old. As these corporations start owning up more property and rent prices rising among renter bidding wars, corporations get more property & people have a much harder time trying to afford private property, we could end up in a world where corporate leaders are the new feudal lords. This also can slowly help lead to an end to modern capitalism. The whole idea of modern capitalism is based around the ability of individuals to be able to privately own property, but one possible end goal of the move corporations are going for could be a world where it is near impossible for anyone who is not wealthy or able to inherit land to easily own property. Property could rarely change hands and remain under the control of certain corporations for many generations. Even if property does change hands, it could end up only changing hands between different corporations or oligarchs instead of having middle or working class individuals be able to buy their first houses & a few acres of land.

It is also important to know that this is an unprecedented move in recent history. Back in 2011, no single investor or corporation in the United States owned more than one thousand homes , which seems pretty good and allows plenty of people who are not investors to have a say in the housing market. However, all of that is starting to change in recent times. By the third quarter of 2021, the top five companies working in real estate had two hundred eighty thousand six hundred thirty-seven homes combined according to the data they provided to the United States government. This is bad for people who are already renting out properties without any ability to buy a home since corporate landlords have been shown to evict people at much higher rates than smaller landlords. In fact, corporate landlords filled to evict at least seventy thousand tenants between September and May of 2021. This was happening even though at the time because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects, there was a federal eviction moratorium that was still in effect that was supposed to prevent people from being kicked out of their homes during those trying times.

Even with continued fears of evictions to this day, many of these corporate landlords saw record profits with their combined earning surging by more than fifty percent within the last year and the top executives of those companies seeing raises of more than twenty percent. Corporate landlords also continue to be on the rise in many major cities across the country such as Charlotte, NC and New York City, New York where millions of people can be essentially held hostage by powerful companies demanding their rent or else you will kicked onto the street! Honestly, I hope something is done about this terrible housing situation and someone puts these corporate landlords up to task, but it does not look like this will be happening anytime soon. If something does not happen anytime soon to deal with these corporations and their buying up of properties, we could be one step closer to a feudal future where corporations demand loyalty or money from the rest of us ‘serfs’ in return for living on ‘their’ property…

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