Jon Ossoff
ATLANTA — Institutional investors who vacuumed up single family homes when prices cratered after the Great Recession are drawing more political heat as renters complain about the impact.
ÐÔÊӽ紫ý Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia announced Wednesday, May 7, that he is launching inquiries with several of the top companies in the sector, following a congressional hearing last year when tenants complained about roach infestations, water-damaged ceilings, and sewage leaking into showers.
The DemocratÐÔÊӽ紫ý announcement came after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday, May 5, that he will not seek to unseat Ossoff, triggering speculation about who the GOP primary candidates will be for next yearÐÔÊӽ紫ý election.
State Republican lawmakers have also targeted the housing industry, illustrating the political traction of the issue.
Last month, lawmakers sent Kemp bipartisan legislation that would require tenants of houses or duplexes to give code enforcement officers contact information for their property manager.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, the chief co-sponsor of House Bill 399, said it would require out-of-state investors, such as hedge funds, to have a local broker and a local property manager.
A more aggressive bill that sought to cap each big owner at 2,000 properties didn’t get far after constitutional concerns were raised by former state Attorney General Sam Olens, who testified for the industry.
Seven corporations own more than 51,000 single-family homes in the 21-county metro-Atlanta region, according to a blog by the Atlanta Regional Commission late last year.
Metro Atlanta was the top region nationally for this investment activity, with 25% of the single-family home rentals — 71,832 homes — consolidated in the hands of large investors in 2022, the ÐÔÊӽ紫ý Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last year.
The 2008 recession forced many homeowners into foreclosure, flooding the market with cheap housing. Institutional investors, such as publicly traded real estate investment trusts, leveraged their access to capital to buy them at scale.
Algorithms allowed investors to identify desirable properties while online management portals allowed them to attract tenants and efficiently manage geographically dispersed portfolios, the GAO report said.
It noted a 2018 report by one organization that said the difficulty in scaling the acquisition and management of properties before the advent of this technology “was the primary reason large-scale investment in single-family housing did not develop sooner.â€
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
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