As Nevada continues to face a dire housing crisis, the consequences of Governor Lombardo always prioritizing special interests instead of putting our families first are taking their toll.
New reporting from the Las Vegas Review-Journal details how a massive corporate landlord bought hundreds of homes across Clark County last summer – just one instance of a larger trend of Wall Street-backed investors purchasing single-family homes in bulk, limiting the amount of affordable housing available for families, and artificially inflating housing prices across the country.
Lombardo stood in the way of efforts to mitigate skyrocketing rental costs when he vetoed SB395, which would have restricted the amount of housing units corporations could purchase each year. This just goes to show once again that Lombardo will always cave to ultra-wealthy corporations and landlords – including the billionaire slumlord who financed his gubernatorial candidacy with tens of millions of dollars – while Nevada families suffer as a result.
Read more below:
Las Vegas Review Journal: ‘Swapping homes like stocks’: Wall Street-backed firm buys 264 valley homes in a day
January 4, 2024
- A Wall Street-backed corporate landlord bought hundreds of Clark County homes in a staggering one-off residential sale in summer 2023.
- Miami-based investment firm Starwood Capital Group sold 264 homes in Clark County for $98 million to Dallas-based Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH), according to Clark County property records.
- The deal, made in three separate transactions, closed on July 18, property records show. The largest sale was $57.5 million for 155 homes, the second was $26.3 million for 70 homes and the third was $14.1 million for 39.
- The majority of the homes sold are in the city of Las Vegas (94), followed by the city of North Las Vegas with 77. The price range for each home ranged from around $292,000 to $694,000, with the average price at $371,514.
- Wall Street-backed hedge funds, corporate landlords and cash-rich investors have been buying up single-family homes across the country as far back as 2009, which experts say means fewer houses on the market for families to purchase. That also could lead to higher rental prices and fewer affordable homes in regions such as the Las Vegas Valley. A MetLife Investment Management study shows these companies could own close to 40 percent of all U.S. houses by 2030.
- Noah Herrera, a real estate agent who has worked in the Las Vegas Valley for nearly 30 years, said Wall Street-backed hedge funds and large corporate landlords first got involved in the housing market after the Great Recession in 2008-09, when real estate values bottomed out across the country.
- Herrera said he worked with a few corporate landlords during the initial buying phase in 2008-09, and they told him they would resell what they bought in five years. But these landlords never put these houses back on the market, he said.
- He said what scares him the most about corporate America getting involved in residential real estate is what are known as “rental-backed securities,” where companies such as Invitation are selling to investors. The product has a lot of similarities to mortgage-backed securities, one of the downfalls of the housing market during the 2008-09 crash.
- Rutgers University researcher Eric Seymour, who compiled data with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said Invitation Homes owns about 3,500 homes in Clark County, a number that has jumped since 2019 when they owned fewer than 3,100 homes. That makes it the second-largest owner of single-family rental homes in Clark County.
- “Large single-family landlords like Invitation and Progress first acquired inventory following the foreclosure crisis, when they bought homes at discounted prices,” he said. “They’ve since grown primarily through acquisitions of competitor firms. As these companies settled in as landlords, they’ve also made bulk deals with competitor firms to grow or shed their presence in particular markets. They are essentially trading with each other to enhance the performance of their overall inventory.”
- U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., who represents Nevada’s 4th Congressional District including North Las Vegas, where the majority of corporate owned single-family rental homes in Clark County reside, said one of the biggest concerns he hears from constituents is the high cost of rent and access to affordable housing.
- Horsford reintroduced legislation early in 2023, called the Housing Oversight and Mitigating Exploitation (HOME) Act, noting that “large institutional speculators” are buying up America’s housing market at an alarming rate. The bill aims to help protect Americans by creating institutional oversight in the housing market, such as allowing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate corporate landlord purchases and stamp out market manipulation.
- “I continue to call for federal investigations into whether corporate landlords have artificially inflated rent and property costs or have systematically targeted certain communities of color, single mothers, or retirees,” Horsford said in a statement to the Review-Journal. “These bulk sales are evidence that once an out-of-state corporate speculator purchases a home, it is unlikely to resurface on the housing market for everyday working families, artificially lowering our already dire supply of housing in Southern Nevada.”
- Estimates from the National Low Income Housing Coalition are that Clark County is already short more than 80,000 affordable housing units, a number that has been rising for years.
###
