THE SOURCE OF TENANT DISTRUST

INVITATION HOMES, with over 80,000 properties in 17 markets, is the largest owner of single family rentals in the country. Because they are owned and financed by Wall Street investors, they are incentivized to squeeze as much profit from their tenants as they possibly can. As a result many people are forced to endure slumlord conditions that include shoddy maintenance, predatory fee stacking, unnecessary evictions, and unaffordable rent increases.

IMPACT ON COMMUNITIES

Invitation Homes and other Wall Street investors are so big that they can limit the supply of affordable homes to purchase in many metropolitan areas.  Investors are muscling out first-time home buyersdisplacing tenantsoutbidding nonprofit affordable housing developers, and changing the demographics of communities.

Tenants of Invitation Homes across the country can fight back

See the Flyer

Background and Key Facts

  • Invitation Homes is the nation’s largest owner and operator of single-family rental homes.
  • Invitation Homes, a Dallas-based real estate company, owns and operates tens of thousands of rental homes in more than a dozen major markets in America. The company owns and operates more than 80,000 single-family rental homes.
  • It’s an institutional landlord. Invitation Homes is a rental business spun out of the global private equity investment firm giant The Blackstone Group.
  • Invitation Homes, which emerged from the push to begin buying foreclosed homes in the wake of the last financial crisis, barely fix them up and then rent them out, is a company that Blackstone built from scratch.
  • “The hardest part wasn’t buying the homes, it was building the business. We created a company from scratch. It was created on a yellow pad. It was an idea. Now it’s a real business,” Blackstone President Jonathan Gray said in the Journal report.
  • Invitation Homes operates in an industry that did not exist a decade ago.
  • The move by institutional investors, private equity firms and hedge funds into the housing market is a new phenomenon.
  •  Invitation Homes was created by Blackstone in 2012 after the housing crisis to acquire formerly foreclosed single-family homes and rent them out after renovations.
  • According to housing industry estimates, there are as many as 17 million single-family rentals across the country, most owned by mom-and-pop landlords or firms operating fewer than 100 such homes.
  • Before the crisis, there were about 10 million rental homes, an indication of how many homeowners were displaced by the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression.
  • Blackstone made a post-recession bet on single-family rental homes.
  • In the early part of this decade, Blackstone began pouring money into distressed residential real estate, spending billions to buy up foreclosures and other distressed properties, then turning those houses into single-family rental properties.
  • Blackstone began snatching up homes in a major way in 2011 and is estimated to have spent $10 billion on its foreclosed-home-to-rental bet.
  • Blackstone’s move into single-family rentals was done through Invitation Homes, which the firm helped grow into one of the nation’s largest single-family rental operators.
  • In November of 2017, Invitation Homes became the biggest U.S. institutional owner of single-family rental homes after merging with Scottsdale, Arizona-based Starwood Waypoint Homes.
  • The multibillion-dollar company likely wouldn’t exist were it not for the foreclosure tsunami resulting from the Great Recession.
  • In 2019, Blackstone began selling off part of its investment in Invitation Homes.
  • Two years after Invitation Homes became the biggest U.S. institutional owner of single-family rental homes, Blackstone cashed out, selling off its remaining shares in the single-family rental operator for more than $1.7 billion.
  • The stock sale closed out Blackstone’s investment of the company.