David Sirota

NEWS: Private equity now owns 1 out of every 10 apartment units in the United States, according to new data.

Abundance Guys did a media tour insisting that oligarchy has nothing to do with the housing crisis. This data destroys their argument.

https://www.levernews.com/thanks-to-trumps-tax-scam-death-isnt-the-end-for-gop-lawmakers-riches/

Thanks To Trump’s Tax Scam, Death Isn’t The End For GOP Lawmakers’ Riches

A new report finds Republican lawmakers stand to massively financially benefit from Trump’s renewed push to end the “death tax.”

The Lever
Apr 10 at 9:23pmWeb
Show threadPreston Maness ☭Apr 10

@davidsirota The report:

https://pestakeholder.org/reports/private-equity-multi-family-housing-tracker/#ownership

says:

>We have identified 121 private equity companies[36] that own at least 8,200 apartment buildings with over 2.2 million units.[37]
>
>...
>
>Private equity’s ownership of almost 2.2 million apartment units represents about 10 percent of the total number of apartment units in the country.[39]

Source 37 is only given as:

>Data Source: Yardi Matrix and Lexis Nexis

Which, unfortunately, is a duo of proprietary sources. The authors likely can't release it for verification :(

Source 39 is given as:

>According to the National Multifamily Housing Council’s tabulation of 2023 American Community Survey microdata from the US Census Bureau, there are almost 23.3 million apartment units in the U.S. An apartment unit is defined as any rental unit in a structure with 5 or more units. https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-data-download/

Alas, that page gives only a bunch of spreadsheets, with no indication of where the 23.3 million number is coming from. Looks like it comes from the "State Distribution of Apartment Stock, 2022" XLS file, as the sum of all 50 cells with numbers for apartment units for each state comes up to "23,275,718" total units, which is indeed "almost 23.3 million."

Their underlying data source is the American Community Survey microdata, and the NMHC frustratingly does not release their work/code on how they go from that microdata to their tabulations.

Attempting to look at building stats from the microdata, for example, gives this:

https://data.census.gov/app/mdat/ACSPUMS1Y2023/table?cv=BLD&rv=ucgid&wt=WGTP&g=AwFm-BVBlYEYA0wBMSRIKxIGxIBxICcCcwJicqcAzCVnLnAOwkFzHJnKLKrK3J0yLMlzIWyAsmLUy1RNVTVa1dNSzVc1FtQLViYBCEQhUIdCCwhcIFiAIhiGMhkQZaGdBiwZsQA

I can't get any of their numbers in their "State Distribution of Apartment Stock, 2022" XLS file (NMHC tabulations of 2023 American Community Survey microdata, US Census Bureau. Updated 10/2024) to line up with this table. According to the above linked table, there are 6,603,715 5+ apartment units, 6,205,203 10+ apartments units, 5,517,342 20+ apartment units, and 9,795,042 50+ apartment units, for a total of 28,121,302 estimated apartment units, across the United States. The table I selected includes DC, but that only accounts for 201,294 of the total.

28.1 million (or 27.9 million without DC) apartment units is pretty far from 23.3 million apartment units. What gives? Perhaps NMHC uses a different Housing Unit Weight? Does other prodcessing of the microdata?

The resulting percentage of apartment units owned by private equity would still be alarming (7.88%), just not quite at that double-digit 10.0% mark.

#CivicTech #Census #landlords #Apartments #PrivateEquity #Statistics

Private Equity Multi-Family Housing Tracker

PESP’s analysis of private equity buyouts in apartment housing reveals that PE firms own 10% of all US apartment units

Private Equity Stakeholder Project PESP
Show threaddaubertlaApr 10
@davidsirota During Trump's first term in office he made changes to who could own certain types of rental property. As a result of those changes a fair number of houses in my personal neighborhood were bought by equity firms. It had a dual effect here in my town in NC. They tended to outbid the family folks so housing prices went through the roof. Every time a house goes on the market, for a family to buy it, they have to outbid the rental company. They have tried jacking up rent but to mixed success. The house behind me has new tenants every year because the rental company jacks the rent up so much at the end of the first year and the people move. Then the house goes into the rental market... sits empty for a while so the rental company brings the rent back down a bit at a time till someone is willing to pay that rent and they re-rent it .
Show threadCherylA6d ago

@davidsirota

I wonder how that compares with how many US care facilities they own.