Just to reinforce this, the last place I lived in was owned by a corporation...of one man, who lived a town away in a modest house and worked as a paper pusher by day.

Indeed. This was discussed about a month ago. My prior comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208561

I've been told that, for privacy reasons, you should even buy your own home under an LLC as well

Depends on how unique your legal name is. Buying your own home as an individual creates a public record with your address and your name. This gets ingested by lots of people search websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ (which I have used). But if your legal name is really common, it would be harder for anyone else to deduce which one is actually you.

For what it's worth, I just searched that site you linked with my name and the zip code I lived in for the first 18 years of my life, and it seems to have a pretty muddled view of who I am. It has my correct age, full legal name, and current address, as well as two of my past apartments and my address for those 18 years where I lived in the zip code I searched, but it also lists my parents current home that they bought over a decade after I had permanently left that state in a city I've never lived in. The landline number it lists is the number my parents had at the house I grew up in, but they don't even use it now, and it wouldn't have been an effective way of reaching me since I used to live at that house, and the mobile number it lists is one I've never seen in my life. For family members, it lists one of my brothers and parents, but not my other brother or either of my two living maternal grandparents, although it has a strangely long list of names I've never heard of, some of whom have my mother's maiden name but aren't my grandparents or any of my relatives with that name who I'm aware of, as well as a bunch of people whose names I don't recognize with last names I'm not aware of being in my family tree.

I'm not saying that site isn't potentially useful as a starting point to find out some stuff, but it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.

(edited to add): It also says there's no public record of me being married, which definitely is not the case. My wife literally co-owns and also lives in the house it lists me as living in (and has the correct purchase date for it), so you'd think that whatever algorithm is used to build the dataset would be smart enough to see if there's any other ways we're legally tied together. It also says it doesn't have any records of business associations I have when last year I registered a single-member LLC for contract work last year. The LLC literally has the same name as me followed by " LLC", because apparently no one else had registered that before in my state, which at least gives some evidence that my name isn't overwhelmingly common.

> it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.

Until you have a stalker who will harass you, your parents, siblings, grandparents... and that stuff isn't all that uncommon.

I'm not saying it's not worth trying to buy a house in a way that ensures privacy. I'm saying that there are probably better ways to consider the risks than looking at a site like this when it literally shows more people I've never met or even heard of than people actually related to me.

If someone is concerned about being stalked, they certainly should consider how to protect themselves if they're purchasing a home, but that would be equally true even if sites like this didn't exist. For someone who isn't otherwise already considering using an LLC to purchase a house for other reasons, I don't think a site like this is worth taking into account.

Significantly complicates getting a mortgage though

The title of the article - "3 companies own nearly 38,000 metro Atlanta homes"

Metro Atlanta has a population of 6 mil, say 2/3 live in detached homes with 2 persons per home. So that's 38,000 out of 2 mil homes, so about 2%

There are well over a million homes in the metro Atlanta area. If the top three owners have less than 4% of a market, need if they act in a completely coordinated manner they have approximately zero market power.

Yes if the market is for rice, but illiquid assets are an entirely different market which can be crazy warped by a few important participants.

How so, could you explain that a bit? I could see them causing a price dip or spike in purchase prices if they bought or sold all at the same time, but that would affect their own prices that they pay or receive, right? What is the market manipulation with 4% of housing stock?

Houses are unique and have irreducible transaction costs which makes the market for them very inefficient and slow relative to a commodity. For one example, if you are in the market for a 3-bedroom house with a garage, the market is already segmented much more narrowly than can be the case in an efficient market like that for a commodity. If you have to move into one as soon as possible for a new job, and you know closing will take a minimum of 3 months, the market for your prospective houses is going to be extremely small without even factoring in other distinctive characteristics like driving distance and schools. 4% of the aggregate market may represent 25-30% of your “market” nonetheless.

Thanks for that! I guess I don't see how there could be market manipulation without also damaging the manipulator, especially in a market that is as transparent as housing, with nearly every sale being at a public price.

Rental manipulation is much much easier, and probably more prevalent. But unfortunately the price-gouging lawsuits from using software to share pricing information have been settled with the landlords paying peanuts.

Maybe if they keep buying the houses in the top school district of the entire city. Which I've never heard of anyone doing.

Maybe easier to just form a realtor cartel?

This assumes that the entire market is for sale at a given time, which is not true. If you have 3 kids and both need to drive to work, there may be only a single digit number of viable houses for sale at a given time in your school district.

I'm not sure deliberate manipulation per se, but the market would be warped by a single participant that owned 4% of the aggregate market. This is especially true if that participant didn't adhere to the normal holding periods and purchasing rationale as the remainder of the market participants. Consider that market manipulation concerns are (some of) the reasons significant holders (>= 5%) of even extremely liquid public companies are required to publicly report ownership and ownership changes.

LLC may be a type of corporation but when people complain about corporations buying up homes they really mean C-corps, not LLCs owned by Uncle Bob who likes to flip houses.

Right, and when people share stats such as "60% of homes are owned by corporations", they're either clueless or are trying to deliberately muddy the waters.

> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse.

I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.

The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.

no offence but this kind of makes you part of the problem

Part of the problem is how hard it is to sell a home in the first place. I'm not interested now, but for a while I was looking at needing to move states, and that was going to involve selling my home and buying (or renting) in the new location. And all the math was saying that anything other than getting really lucky with a sale just before moving was going to cost me a LOT of extra money and be a drain and a hassle on top of all of the stresses involved with moving to a completely new state.

I really hate the idea of selling to these "we'll buy your home fast" shops, but I have to be honest that had I needed to make that move, it would have been a very real possibility.

I could have a principle and live in a falling apart money pit in a declining neighborhood or move to a brand spanking new home in a neighborhood on the way up.

That's not really meaningless though. You just explained in more detail some attributes of corporations, many of which are precisely the things many people are criticizing when they criticize the fact that corporations own lots of housing. Of course we all know that there are still humans behind the corporations.

This suggests that a single-family home is generally a bad investment. Maybe not if you're living in the house yourself (no renter-landlord inefficiency), but still idk. Could make more sense in certain areas where all the value is in the land.

It's segmented. If you don't have a whole lot of capital but want to invest in real estate, you buy a rental home or two.

If you do have a lot of capital ($100M+), you don't, because you can spend that money to build or buy an apartment complex that gives you something like 5x as many tenants per dollar spent. And is cheaper to maintain in the long haul.