KCRag Forum

phuqueue wrote: ↑Sun Jun 23, 2019 8:58 am

FangKC wrote: ↑Sat Jun 22, 2019 9:33 pm Meet the A.I. Landlord That’s Building a Single-Family-Home Empire

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Sean Dobson, Amherst’s CEO, is an imposing Texan data savant who dropped out of college to get into mortgage trading. A decade ago, he made a killing shorting shaky debt during the housing crash. Today he’s adding 1,000 homes a month to his empire with the help of artificial intelligence, using data modeling to make dozens of offers a day on potentially profitable houses. The Main Street homes are a $3.2 billion investment that generates around $300 million in annual rental income, but Dobson harbors far bigger ambitions: “We want to get to 1 million homes in the next 15 years or so,” he says. While that figure reflects as much bravado as realism—it’s more than 60 times the number of homes Amherst owns today—the fact that it’s conceivable shows how much the housing market has changed, and how technology is helping investors profit from those changes.

The rise of the single-family-rental industry reflects profound shifts in the finances and attitudes of America’s families. Homeownership, long a bedrock of financial stability, has become unattainable or undesirable for many middle-income workers—for reasons including tighter lending standards, large college-debt loads, lagging wage growth and savings, and real estate speculators, such as the guy we are profiling in this very article, who outbid would-be owner-occupants to snap up "investment" property and drive prices up broadly. According to ­Yar­deni Research, slightly more than one in three households that would have been buying first homes before the financial crisis is now either renting or still living with their parents.

These trends translate into roughly 5 million households that are renting single-family homes rather than taking out mortgages and building equity, and that’s Amherst’s target market. Its specialty is grabbing run-down properties in nice, middle-class subdivisions—guided by algorithms that help it avoid bidding wars and money pits—which it then spruces up for the new rental generation. Amherst’s typical customers are couples in their early forties with one or two kids and household incomes around $60,000. They’re paying an average rent of $1,450 a month. “That’s almost exactly what they’d pay on a mortgage and other expenses if they owned the house,” says Dobson. “We’re catering to a whole new class of Americans—the former buyers who are now either forced renters or renters by choice.” And Dobson is betting that this new class is a permanent one.
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http://fortune.com/longform/single-fami ... ket-newtab

Added back in a fairly glaring omission from this article

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But since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Koch Industries has been plowing money into real estate.

In March this year, the Wall Street Journal published a report headlined Charles Koch Is Betting Big on Distressed Real Estate. The paper reported that the billionaire’s corporate conglomerate “is emerging as a major real-estate investor during the pandemic, using its robust cash reserves to buy properties at beaten-down prices and betting on a longer-term recovery”.

Last April, a month into the pandemic, Koch Real Estate Investments made a “$200m preferred-equity investment in Amherst Holdings LLC’s single-family rental business”, according to the corporate law firm Jones Day, which said it advised the Koch Industries subsidiary on the deal. Amherst says that since 2012, “its affiliated funds have acquired and operated more than 30,000 homes”.
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chaglang wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:22 am But the quickest/easiest path to reducing evictions seems to be to utilize whatever leverage the city might have over its resident-owned rental property owners.

chaglang wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:22 am But the quickest/easiest path to reducing evictions seems to be to utilize whatever leverage the city might have over its resident-owned rental property owners.

beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:57 am

chaglang wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:22 am But the quickest/easiest path to reducing evictions seems to be to utilize whatever leverage the city might have over its resident-owned rental property owners.

You make it sound like rental property owners want to evict people.

normalthings wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:27 pm Does ADA functionally block the 6unit 3 floor and 8 unit, 4 floor missing middle buildings some clamor for? Should ADA be adjusted to allow for these structured as long as the ground floor units are fully accessible?

normalthings wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:27 pm Does ADA functionally block the 6unit 3 floor and 8 unit, 4 floor missing middle buildings some clamor for? Should ADA be adjusted to allow for these structured as long as the ground floor units are fully accessible?

Nearly half of American workers do not earn enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment, according to new data.

Rents in the US continued to increase through the pandemic, and a worker now needs to earn about $20.40 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental. The median wage in the US is about $21 an hour.

The data, from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, shows that millions of Americans – from Amazon warehouse workers to cab drivers to public school teachers – are struggling to pay rent. For the poorest Americans, market-rate housing is out of reach in virtually all of the country.
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normalthings wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:21 pm Bough introduced an ordinance that would study adding a tax on new construction (linkage fee) to pay for affordable housing

DaveKCMO wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:25 pm

normalthings wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:21 pm Bough introduced an ordinance that would study adding a tax on new construction (linkage fee) to pay for affordable housing

Would it be applied to single-family home construction?