There’s a growing narrative that large institutional investors are the reason housing has become unaffordable. It’s a convenient story. It’s also the wrong one, according to Kevin Erdmann at Erdmann Housing Tracker.
The real issue isn’t who’s buying homes—it’s that we don’t have enough of them.
The U.S. is short millions of housing units, especially rentals. We know this. That shortage didn’t appear overnight, and it wasn’t caused by a handful of large buyers. It was created by years of underbuilding and a mortgage system that has made it far harder for families to buy than it was for decades before 2008.
In many markets, renters are already paying far more each month than a mortgage would cost on the same home. They aren’t being “outbid” by investors. According to Erdmann, they’re being blocked by restricted mortgage access, shaped by post-2008 regulations at agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Before 2008, families consistently outcompeted investors because financing worked. Large-scale single-family rental ownership barely existed—not because it was banned, but because it wasn’t needed.
To quote Erdmann:
Under current conditions, the main American housing problem is that we lack millions of homes that would be rental units for households that would form if the homes were there. We desperately need deep pocketed investors to invest trillions in American real estate for those missing households.
Housing math doesn’t care about politics. It cares about supply, capital, and access.
Read the full piece here: Anti-corporate Housing
