Salient to Investors:
Jonathan Gray at Blackstone said:
- The institutional buying wave has passed and Blackstone’s acquisition pace has declined 70 percent from its peak last year
- Blackstone has narrowed most of its purchasing to Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, Orlando and Tampa.
- Institutional buyers are tapering their buying and are in a relatively limited number of markets, yet home prices continue to rise strongly, even in markets where institutional buyers have not purchased a single home.
- Institutional investors are not going away even though their size will remain a modest part of the market.
Private-equity firms, hedge funds, REITs et al have spent more than $20 billion to buy as many as 200,000 rental homes in the last 2 years.
American Homes 4 Rent and Colony American Homes have been scaling back as home prices have risen 24 percent since a post-bubble low in March 2012.
Jade Rahmani at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said large investors are focusing on fewer locations as they gain experience and prices rise and account for at most 10 percent of the 2 million homes bought by investors in the last 2 years.
RealtyTrac said corporate investors bought 25 percent of homes sold in the Atlanta region, where prices are up 37 percent since the March 2012 trough.
Read the full article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-14/blackstone-s-home-buying-binge-ends-as-prices-surge-mortgages.html
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