Yes. Read _All The Devils Are Here_ for an excellent exposition about how the subprime market was first invented as a vehicle to get private banks out from under the thumb of Fannie Mae, then turned into a vehicle for boiler room speculation, and then fed back to Fannie Mae. The interests of homeowners were not a primary feature of the development of the subprime market; in fact, one open secret of the phenomenon was how few of those loans actually went to first mortgages on owner-occupied sole residences.
Are you sure that 67.4% of inhabited housing units in the US are actually inhabited by the owner? If I take out a 30 year loan on a house and then move in, the bank still owns that property. I would expect the number to be significantly lower than 67.4% when you factor in rentals + people living in homes with refinancing or otherwise not-fully-paid-off mortgages. But I don't actually know what the number is or where to find it.
More to the point, the homeowner is the one exposed to appreciation or depreciation on the open market. The bank has a fixed dollar value worth.
This is objectively untrue for any sensible definition of "most": 67.4% of inhabited housing units in the US are inhabited by the owner.
Pedantically, "Most homes are occupied by their owner" is not the same as "Most people own their home"
This is my soapbox issue, yes. But there's no invective here, just a bit of "why!?" b/c I hoped to see a YC company in this industry on the side of the little guys/gals, not the 500 pound gorillas.
home ownership remains an unattainable pipe dream for most people
This is objectively untrue for any sensible definition of "most": 67.4% of inhabited housing units in the US are inhabited by the owner.
Is home ownership going down? No, by any sensible measurement, it is increasing, across all races and most income groups. For folks who are often the have-nots in the US economy, home ownership increased rapidly (did people think "sub prime mortgages" existed solely to inflate bank revenue numbers? The flip side of that coin is giving loans to people who would historically have been classified as too risky for a mortgage gives houses to people who historically would have been too risky to qualify for a mortgage.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_Sta...
An addition underappreciated side-effect of financial engineering in the last twenty years is that, even post-bubble, down payments have gone from "your life savings" (which, at 20%, they really were) to "optional for many people and often and achievable in 3~5 years of dedicated work" (norms are in flux now, but there are a lot of banks which will take 5% as sufficient skin in the game for a prospective owner with decent credit).
I have no significant disagreement with you regarding the value add by Realtors and the 6% commission structure, although that is not inviolate, particularly in the current climate. (5% of something beats 6% of nothing every day of the week.)