“Forever Renters”: Owning Housing Shares, Not Homes

Keywords: housing, investor, platform, millennial, corporate landlord
Abstract Type: Lightning Paper Abstract

Abstract

For the past decade, digital real estate platforms have fueled speculative activity in the US housing market. Property trading platforms, such as the Oakland-based firm Roofstock, have aggressively pursued the liquification of real estate assets with the goal to trade housing equity like corporate stocks. By creating affordable consumer products such as fractional shares of property, Roofstock is generating unprecedented opportunities for a swell of millennial retail investors to buy and trade shares of rental housing. Experts have raised concerns about corporate landlords (Blackstone Group, American Homes 4 Rent etc.) destabilizing regional housing markets through practices such as wholesale rent increases, high eviction rates and crowding out would-be homebuyers from the market. Yet as a new class of young shareowners emerges, little research to date has explored this precarious equity ownership arrangement and the risks or rewards of retail fractional investing. This research has implications for rental housing policy, municipal governance, and the study of millennial debt and wealth.