The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and more timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is investigating a trend that you can find across America. The AJC found whole blocks of houses now owned by corporations that have turned those single-family homes into rental units.
There is nothing illegal about what is happening, the AJC points out, but it is a reality that when cash-rich corporations compete against individuals who are looking for a home to buy, the individual buyer has no chance.
Try to get your head around the massive number of homes being gobbled up. It is not dozens or even hundreds of houses. It is thousands upon thousands of homes — and that is just in Atlanta. Two companies now own more than 10,000 individual houses each in the Atlanta area.
(The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
The trend is showing up in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, California and Texas. Pew’s Stateline reports:
Across most states, investor purchases of homes spiked in 2021 and remained elevated in the early months of 2022. Investors made 29% or more of the home purchases last year in Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas and Nevada, and investor purchases doubled or more from 2020 for Florida, Nevada, Vermont and Washington.
In North Las Vegas, Nevada, which is mostly Hispanic and Black, residents have gathered petitions for a ballot initiative limiting rent increases, saying they’ve been outbid by investors who have raised rent sharply in recent years.
The controls were supported by Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, who blamed “out-of-state speculators coming in buying up homes in our neighborhoods and raising the rent,” and says the North Las Vegas plan could become a template for statewide rent controls.
The South Florida Business Journal reported data last year that shows the corporate buying trend has been unfolding for some time:
In Miami-Dade County, investors bought 29% of all homes purchased in the second quarter (2022). It was a 9.3% jump from the year before, amounting to a total of $3.47 billion, according to a recent report from Seattle-based real estate brokerage Redfin.
During the same time period in Broward, investors bought 19.6% of all homes purchased, a 4.9% bump from the year before. This amounts to $1.43 billion worth of purchases, the report stated.
In Palm Beach County, investors acquired 17% of homes sold, a 1.4% increase from the year before, totaling about $1.84 billion.
Elsewhere in Florida, investors pounced on Duval County in the second quarter, pouring $994.49 million into Jacksonville and snatching up 32% of the homes sold there.
That’s the highest market share in the U.S., and an increase of more than 40% from the year before, Redfin’s report showed.
The AJC investigation includes this passage:
Long the bedrock of family wealth for the middle class, single-family homes have been snatched up in the thousands by private equity firms and publicly traded companies, converted into rental properties and bundled into complex investment vehicles.
These firms did not create Atlanta’s affordability crisis. A generational housing shortage, inflated construction costs and a surge in consumer demand have all contributed to the historic rise in prices. But a growing body of evidence leaves little doubt that the flood of cash from investors has exacerbated it.
“They go after every listing under $500,000 … it’s like clockwork,” said Maura Neill, a realtor in Alpharetta. “The property gets listed and, sight unseen, they make offers within an hour.”
The trend is rooted in the post-2008 housing crash when the government made investment homes attractive to buyers who bought up troubled properties and rehabbed them. But since then, corporate buyers have directly competed with individual buyers for properties. And, the AJC said, there are good reasons to be concerned that mega owners will become rental monopolies, influencing home rental prices communitywide.
In 2022, a New York Times story that examined this trend of corporate homebuyers included a defense from the National Rental Home Council:
Nationwide, large investment companies remain a small fraction of America’s home buyers.
“It’s really difficult to make the case that a handful of companies that own 300,000 homes across the country really have the ability to influence things like home prices and rental rates,” said David Howard, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, which represents the single-family rental home industry.
And Pew’s Stateline included this passage:
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.
U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, defended landlords at a U.S. House committee hearing on the issue of investor-owned homes in June. Racially diverse suburbs in Minnesota are among those targeted by investor home purchases, according to a report last year by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.
Los Angeles County started a rent registry that makes it easier for local governments to keep track of who owns rental properties.
A quarter of a million ‘missing’ students
During the pandemic, schools lost track of nearly a quarter of a million students who apparently didn’t transfer to new schools, districts or cities. The Associated Press and researchers at Stanford say those students have vanished. The AP reports:
An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.
In short, they’re missing.
The AP/Stanford teams report that 184,000 students moved to home-schooling and 103,000 appear to have transferred to private schools. But that still leaves 240,000 students unaccounted for. The reporting revealed:
Overall, public school enrollment fell by 710,000 students between the 2019-2020 and 2021-2022 school years in the 21 states plus Washington, D.C., that provided the necessary data.
States where kindergarten is optional were more likely to have larger numbers of unaccounted-for students, suggesting the missing also include many young learners kept home instead of starting school.
California alone showed over 150,000 missing students in the data, and New York had nearly 60,000. Census estimates are imperfect. So, AP and Stanford ran a similar analysis for pre-pandemic years in those two states. It found almost no missing students at all, confirming something out of the ordinary occurred during the pandemic.
Journalists who are interested in following up can look at the data here.
Why don’t they play the Super Bowl on Saturday?
Does it make any sense at all to hold the Super Bowl on Sundays, which leaves the American workforce and schools bleary-eyed on Monday?
By the tens of thousands, people have signed a petition asking for a change. But petitions do not speak as loud as advertisers. Last year a bunch of high schoolers launched a similar petition, and nobody paid attention to that either.
One Tennessee lawmaker is suggesting that the Super Bowl be considered a state holiday. That would mean the state would grant workers a recovery day on the Monday after.
The Super Bowl has been played on Sunday since the championship began in 1967 and almost all NFL games are played on Sunday so maybe it is just habit more than reason at play here.
The new Bing is cool, and it really works
There are some phrases you never expected to say in life. One of them is, “You really ought to try Bing.” The search engine was once widely mocked and dissed but, in the last few days, Microsoft gave it a rebirth and some AI power. Critics are raving. Some are saying it is “better than Google” as a search engine. The difference is that the new Bing will create whole-cloth answers not just find you links.
Let me give you an example of what I got when I asked Bing and then Google, “What is the Poynter Institute?”
(Screenshot/Bing)
(Screenshot/Google)
Other reviews:
- Business Insider gives a nice tutorial.
- Yahoo says it is “incredibly impressed.”
- Publishers are concerned about whether Bing’s AI interface will scrape stuff behind paywalls.
- CNet
- TechCrunch
