Dig into that number and you'll see that it is including relatively small landlords with more than 1 other property as 'institutional investors.'

Regardless, these investors are paying way below the typical average for new homes in Texas, but somehow responsible for the affordability crisis?

Individual landlords also tend to play games with renovictions or personal-use evictions to inflate their rents. I would never rent from someone who can decide their "nephew" wants the space and they just couldn't say no to him but then that fell through and meanwhile you're out on the street.

> I would never rent from someone who can decide their "nephew" wants the space and they just couldn't say no to him but then that fell through and meanwhile you're out on the street.

I never understood that attitude. I always took leases as a two-way street. That is, I'm free to leave and go somewhere else at the end of my lease, but the owner is also free to not rent to me at the end of my lease (with appropriate notice). It seems weird to me to have the expectation that if I sign, say, a 1-year lease that means I should have the right to renew that lease in perpetuity.

Well, in lots of parts of the country, that 'weird expectation' is the law.

Where in the US are perpetual rights to extend 1 year leases the law?

Where I live in California, for the large majority of rental properties, the owner cannot evict me unless they plan on exiting the rental market or I have somehow violated the lease.

I think this covers flat out most rental properties in California as well.

So the answer: California

Stuff like this, broadly, is why California is known for its affordable rents and sane housing markets :)

Even if there is a right to lease renewal, how much the lease will increase is often not regulated or loosely regulated. So…you can always price out a tenant you don’t want to keep, but there are often some extra laws around that.

Not in California, where the rent increases are limited in the vast majority of units (pretty much anything built before 2007) :)

I agree that this has an absolutely massive chilling effect on leasing & building, given that, reasoning from the past, any new development is almost certain to be subject to rent control within 20 years at most. I've never lived in a state nuts enough to have state-wide rent control before, it's interesting.

Well, they have property tax control as well so it isn’t surprising. But ya, rent control sucks in that it picks a few winners to the detriment of everyone else. Great for stability if you win it, but getting in is super hard. California still could stand to lose a few million people, maybe that’s their intention.

I fully understand that, and I think it's really bad policy, similar to rent control. It's just one factor among many, but it contributes to California's astronomical housing crisis - when you make it so distasteful for people to rent out their homes in the first place, people respond by being loath to add badly needed inventory and instead put their homes to other uses, including just letting it sit empty.

I disagree merely with it being a weird or wrong expectation in many cases, not that it is bad policy.

That's where vacancy taxes should be kicking in. People need to get it through their heads: you don't have some god-given right to hoard property for any other purpose than for it to be legit occupied. It needs to be discouraged as an investment vehicle to the detriment of all the other productive and pro-social uses for it.

Use it or lose it I say. You wanna invest? That's what the S&P and index funds are for. Go thusly

Do you really only plan ahead 1 year at a time? Seems like an enormously inefficient use of one's time to lily-pad their housing year to year.