U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia has announced an investigation into the corporate ownership of single-family homes in Georgia – a practice he claimed raises prices for families and reduces the supply of homes available for purchase by individual families.
The investigation will examine the practices of four major companies that collectively own 29,406 private homes in metro Atlanta. Though focused on Georgia, it comes at a time when federal and legislators in some states are considering various laws to regulate the sector and protect would-be homebuyers…
A 2024 paper by researchers Taylor Shelton of Georgia State University and Eric Seymour of Rutgers described “tangled webs of corporate property ownership which are to deliberately obscure the true ownership and concentration of such property from public view.”
By untangling that web, the researchers found that three companies – Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings – owned more than 19,000 single-family homes in metro Atlanta’s five core counties, using “an extensive network of more than 190 corporate aliases.” It was likely with this in mind that Ossoff’s letter called on each company to list all its wholly and partly owned subsidiaries.
A 2024 study of corporate ownership in Atlanta found that it resulted in the loss of $1.25 billion in equity from affected neighborhoods between 2010-2022. And $681 million of that loss fell on the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods, where corporations are involved in 70% of single-family home transactions, compared to 30-40% for other neighborhoods. The researchers, Nicholas Polimeni and Brian Y. An of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, said homes in the Sunbelt are especially targeted because many Southern states have weak tenant protections, rising home values and economic growth, with weaker access to mortgage markets for nonwhites.