Housing
Would You Rather Pay Your Rent to a Bum Landlord or a Wall Street Investor?
The housing bust may have created a new kind of rental industry. Is that a good thing?
William D. Cohan has a very interesting piece in the October issue of The Atlantic on Wall Street's renewed enthusiasm for real estate – this time not for the lure of mortgage-backed securities, but for the seemingly less exotic promise of rental properties.
Five years after the housing crash, Cohan writes, "the fast money has returned to the housing market, but in a more tangible way: big, institutional investors are buying up thousands of single-family houses out of foreclosure, renovating them if needed, and renting them out to people who can no longer afford to buy them."