This just in:
Wall Street realizes they cannot be in the housing business
a big whoopsie…!
(and so why are we foreclosing?)
From David Dayen:
I’ve followed the Wall Street rental scheme for some time. You know the basics by now: Big Money investors decided to buy up all the foreclosed properties their pals at the banks created during the financial crisis, and rent them out to many of the same people who lost their homes. Then, they started selling securities backed by the rental revenue, just like the mortgage-backed securities from the crisis. Profiting off their own failure: It was Wall Street’s perfect plan.
There was just one problem: turns out that institutional investors have no idea how to manage rental properties.
That has become clear through a series of new statistics from early investors, who regarded themselves as the trailblazers of a hot new asset class. For example, nobody has purchased more properties and converted them into rentals than Blackstone, holders of roughly 45,000 nationwide. Invitation Homes, a Blackstone subsidiary, issued the first rental-backed security last November, and just released its first of this year, 2014-SFR1, worth $1 billion and based on 6,537 properties in selected markets, including Phoenix, Atlanta, Sacramento, California, several parts of Florida and Riverside County, California. Yet while these areas have tight housing inventory, vacancies at the Invitation Homes properties have surged.
