Rent-to-Ow!

Bait and Switch

Insider quoted me in Private Equity Sold Them a Dream of Home Ownership. They Got Evicted Instead. It reads, in part,

Erica Hines-Denson had no idea how bad the odds against her were.

Student loans and a recent divorce had dinged her credit score. But she and her new husband, Elquinton Denson, were building a blended family and they dreamed of buying a home in the greater Atlanta area. After lenders turned them down for a traditional mortgage, a realtor told her there might be another way. Something called a lease-purchase, or rent-to-own, agreement.

“This was our way to own a home finally,” Hines-Denson said. “It was like we found a loophole.”

It took just a weekend of house hunting to find a house they loved: a stately four-bedroom, 30 miles southeast of Atlanta, with a built-in bar in the basement where they pictured hosting family and friends. Listed at $275,000, it was in their price range.

There was a catch. The couple wouldn’t be buying. Instead, a Chicago-based company called Home Partners of America would make a cash offer and rent the house back to them, with an option to buy within five years.

Home Partners supplied a lengthy agreement detailing the terms, including built-in annual increases to their rent and to the eventual purchase price. The document was more than 50 pages long; Hines-Denson said the company gave them just 24 hours to review it and sign. But the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. “You’re like, ‘Oh Lord, this is my chance,'” she said. “So you’re moving quick.”

The deal quickly turned sour. The company locked her out of the online payment portal after she missed a single month’s rent, adding hefty fees that made it impossible to catch up. After she missed a second month, the company swiftly filed for an eviction.

While a judge stayed her legal case under the federal COVID-19 eviction moratorium, the company’s management agency continued to call, Hines-Denson said, threatening to remove her belongings. In a final insult, the company kept their two-month security deposit when she and her family finally moved out.

Private Equity Moves In

Home Partners, which launched in 2012, now owns more than 28,000 homes nationwide. It is the largest of a handful of new companies promising “a clear path to homeownership” for families not yet ready or able to buy.

The company’s success has inspired startup competitors such as the New York-based company Landis, which boasts of investments from entertainers Will Smith and Jay-Z. Once dominated by fly-by-night operators, rent-to-own is now attracting some of the biggest players from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz led a Series A funding round for a rent-to-own competitor, Divvy Homes, in 2018. BlackRock and KKR purchased a majority stake in Home Partners by 2014, before private-equity giant Blackstone Group bought the company in 2021 for $6 billion.

In its marketing, Home Partners emphasizes that it offers “flexibility, choice and transparency,” providing the opportunity to “rent your dream home” without making a long-term commitment. “Home Partners has created a path to home ownership for tens of thousands of people who may not otherwise have had one,” a company spokesperson told Insider. “We are tremendously proud of our business.”

Yet Home Partners tenants, in interviews and court documents, say they got stuck in barely livable dwellings, with leaking sewage, broken air conditioners, filthy carpets, or nonworking electrical outlets. They describe being blocked from seeing home-inspection reports and facing swift eviction filings for a single late payment. One tenant filed a lawsuit claiming she suffered injuries when the ceiling of her home collapsed.

Hines-Denson said she felt like she’d been “set up to fail.”

More than 4,000 Home Partners tenants have purchased their homes over the past decade, according to a July 2022 paper from Moody’s Analytics, coauthored by an advisor to the company. But over the same time, nearly four times as many tenants — roughly 15,000 — moved out without buying.

An analysis of contracts and sales and eviction data shows that rent-to-own tenants are often left with the worst of all worlds. They have to shoulder many of the costs and responsibilities of homeownership, and the financial odds are stacked against them to end up as owners. Meanwhile, many are paying above-market rent.

“I’m very sympathetic when someone says they’ve identified a large segment of the population not being served by the current housing and mortgage landscape,” said David Reiss, the research director for the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School.

“What you don’t want to hear next is, ‘Therefore, we can do whatever we want to them.'”

*.     *.     *

“Rent-to-own has this really sordid history,” said Reiss. “It’s an area of the housing market that remains underregulated. That’s part of the attraction for many operators.” 

New Landlord in Town

Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in "It's A Wonderful Life"

Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in “It’s A Wonderful Life”

Bloomberg quoted me in Wall Street, America’s New Landlord, Kicks Tenants to the Curb. It opens,

On a chilly December afternoon in Atlanta, a judge told Reiton Allen that he had seven days to leave his house or the marshals would kick his belongings to the curb. In the packed courtroom, the truck driver, his beard flecked with gray, stood up, cast his eyes downward and clutched his black baseball cap.

The 44-year-old father of two had rented a single-family house from a company called HavenBrook Homes, which is controlled by one of the world’s biggest money managers, Pacific Investment Management Co. Here in Fulton County, Georgia, such large institutional investors are up to twice as likely to file eviction notices as smaller owners, according to a new Atlanta Federal Reserve study.

“I’ve never been displaced like this,” said Allen, who said he fell behind because of unexpected childcare expenses as his rent rose above $900 a month. “I need to go home and regroup.”

Hedge funds, large investment firms and private equity companies helped the U.S. housing market recover after the crash in 2008 by turning empty foreclosures from Atlanta to Las Vegas into occupied rentals.

Now among America’s biggest landlords, some of these companies are leaving tenants like Allen in the cold. In a business long dominated by mom-and-pop landlords, large-scale investors are shifting collections conversations from front stoops to call centers and courtrooms as they try to maximize profits.

“My hope was that these private equity firms would provide a new kind of rental housing for people who couldn’t — or didn’t want to — buy during the housing recovery,” said Elora Raymond, the report’s lead author. “Instead, it seems like they’re contributing to housing instability in Atlanta, and possibly other places.”

American Homes 4 Rent, one of the nation’s largest operators, and HavenBrook filed eviction notices at a quarter of its houses, compared with an average 15 percent for all single-family home landlords, according to Ben Miller, a Georgia State University professor and co-author of the report. HavenBrook — owned by Allianz SE’s Newport Beach, California-based Pimco — and American Homes 4 Rent, based in Agoura Hills, California, declined to comment.

Colony Starwood Homes initiated proceedings on a third of its properties, the most of any large real estate firm. Tom Barrack, chairman of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, and the company he founded, Colony Capital, are the largest shareholders of Colony Starwood, which declined to comment.

Diane Tomb, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, which represents institutional landlords, said her members offer flexible payment plans to residents who fall behind. The cost of eviction makes it “the last option,” Tomb said. The Fed examined notices, rather than completed evictions, which are rarer, she said.

“We’re in the business to house families — and no one wants to see people displaced,” Tomb said.

According to a report last year from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, a record 21.3 million renters spent more than a third of their income on housing costs in 2014, while 11.4 million spent more than half. With credit tightening, the homeownership rate has fallen close to a 51-year low.

In January 2012, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke encouraged investors to use their cash to stabilize the housing market and rehabilitate the vacant single-family houses that damage neighborhoods and property values.

Now, the Atlanta Fed’s own research suggests that the eviction practices of big landlords may also be destabilizing. An eviction notice can ruin a family’s credit and make it more difficult to rent elsewhere or qualify for public assistance.

Collection Strategy?

In Atlanta, evictions are much easier on landlords. They are cheap: about $85 in court fees and another $20 to have the tenant ejected, according to Michael Lucas, a co-author of the report and deputy director of the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation. With few of the tenant protections of places like New York, a family can find itself homeless in less than a month.

In interviews and court filings, renters and housing advocates said that some investment firms are impersonal and unresponsive, slow to make necessary repairs and quick to evict tenants who withhold rent because of complaints about maintenance. The researchers said some landlords use an eviction notice as a “routine rent-collection strategy.”

Aaron Kuney, HavenBrook’s former executive director of acquisitions, said the companies would rather keep their existing tenants as long as possible to avoid turnover costs.

But “they want to get them out quickly if they can’t pay,” said Kuney, now chief executive officer of Piedmont Asset Management, a private equity landlord in Atlanta. “Finding people these days to rent your homes is not a problem.”

Poor Neighborhoods

The Atlanta Fed research, based on 2015 court records, marks an early look at Wall Street’s role in evictions since investment firms snapped up hundreds of thousands of homes in hard-hit markets across the U.S.

Researchers found that evictions for all kinds of landlords are concentrated in poor, mostly black neighborhoods southwest of the city. But the study found that the big investors evicted at higher rates even after accounting for the demographics of the community where homes were situated.

Tomb, of the National Rental Home Council, said institutional investors at times buy large blocks of homes from other landlords and inherit tenants who can’t afford to pay rent. They also buy foreclosed homes whose occupants may refuse to sign leases or leave.

Those cases make the eviction rates appear higher than for smaller landlords, according to Tomb, whose group represents Colony Starwood, American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. The largest firms send notices at rates similar to apartment buildings, which house the majority of Atlanta renters.

Staying Home

Not all investment firms file evictions at higher rates. Invitation Homes, a unit of private equity giant Blackstone Group LP that is planning an initial public offering this year, sent notices on 14 percent of homes, about the same as smaller landlords, records show. In Fulton County, Invitation Homes works with residents to resolve 85 percent of cases, and less than 4 percent result in forced departures, according to spokeswoman Claire Parker.

The Fed research doesn’t say why many institutional investors evict at higher rates. It could be because their size enables them to negotiate less expensive legal rates and replace renters more quickly than mom-and-pop operators.

“Lots of small landlords, when they have good tenants who don’t cause trouble, they’ll work with someone who has lost a job or can’t pay for the short term,” said David Reiss, a Brooklyn Law School professor who specializes in residential real estate.

Mortgages from the Shadows

dollar-sign-silhouette

 

 

Realtor.com quoted me in ‘Shadow Banks’ Are on the Rise for Home Loans: Should We Be Afraid? It opens,

Where do home buyers go for a mortgage? To a bank, of course—or at least that’s what many might think. Yet a new force has taken over home financing, called “shadow banks.” So what are these non-banks exactly, and should we run for the hills?

In a nutshell, these are the less conventional places that don’t provide savings accounts, only loans to buy homes. They include companies like Quicken Loans, which is one of the nation’s largest mortgage providers, Caliber, and loanDepot.com.

But they can also be companies run by wealthy individuals using their personal fortunes to finance loans and then pocketing monthly interest payments, according to the Wall Street Journal. Or they could be funded by private equity, which is financed by pooled investor cash.

And, as a group, they’re no longer operating on the fringes of the housing industry. Instead, shadow banks “have overtaken U.S. commercial banks, to grab a record slice” of the market,” according to a recent housing report by ATTOM Data Solutions.

This group of nontraditional lenders now accounts for 48.3% of mortgages in 2016—compared to just 23.4% in 2008, according to the ATTOM report.

“The big banks got burned by the financial crisis, so they’ve become much more hesitant to make loans that are even close to being risky,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM.

These mortgage makers are very appealing to buyers without a 20%—or even 10%—down payment and therefore have trouble getting a loan from a regular old bank, says Blomquist. This might make sense for first-time buyers, or folks who have gone through a foreclosure.

But are they right for everyone? And, more to the point: Are they harbingers of the risky loaning behavior that help bring on the U.S. housing collapse?

Could shadow banks lead to another housing crisis?

As a group, these lenders are not subject to the same level of governmental scrutiny, regulations, and fees that drove many traditional financial institutions, like banks, out of the space after the housing bust. But they still come under a significant amount of federal oversight.

In short, regular banks retreated, so shadow banks moved in. What’s wrong with that?

As market media site Seeking Alpha has pointed out, shadow banks are “some of the same characters that played leading roles [in the last housing crisis].”

Not all experts believe we should be overly worried.

“While it’s true that so-called shadow banks played roles in the last housing crisis … the market itself is very different,” says David Reiss, a professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and editor of REFinBlog.com.

For one, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in 2010 in response to the housing meltdown of 2008, changed how all lenders—banks, shadow banks, and otherwise—make loans, to better ensure there isn’t another housing bust.

Another big difference: Lenders are now documenting the income of borrowers to make sure these new homeowners can afford to make their monthly payments.

“There’s no evidence out there that non-banks are lending in any sort of imprudent way and/or hurting consumers,” Guy Cecala, publisher and CEO of Inside Mortgage Finance, tells realtor.com®. “In fact, most non-banks are more competitive than banks when it comes to mortgage interest rates and fees.”

“But they don’t have the same level of capital [such as cash], assets, or liquidity as banks do,” he says.

What to consider before getting a shadow bank loan

Borrowers should just take care to tread carefully and examine the terms and conditions of the financing before signing on the dotted line, says Mark Greene, a longtime mortgage lender based in Hackensack, NJ.

He recommends looking for red flags like adjustable rate change terms, prepayment penalties, and other hidden fees.

Good ol’ common sense will come in handy too.

“If your loan is coming from a fishy-sounding company like Two Brothers Fly-by-Night Hard Money-Lenders, Inc., you may want to dig a bit deeper, to figure out what kind of lender it really is,” says law professor Reiss.

REFinBlog has been nominated for the second year in a row for The Expert Institute’s Best Legal Blog Competition in the Education Category. Please vote here if you like what you read.

Wall Street’s New Toxic Transactions

Toxic Real Estate

The National Consumer Law Center released a report, Toxic Transactions: How Land Installment Contracts Once Again Threaten Communities of Color. It describes land installment contracts as follows:

Land contracts are marketed as an alternative path to homeownership in credit-starved communities. The homebuyers entering into these transactions are disproportionately . . . people of color and living on limited income. Many are from immigrant communities.

These land contracts are built to fail, as sellers make more money by finding a way to cancel the contract so as to churn many successive would-be homeowners through the property. Since sellers have an incentive to churn the properties, their interests are exactly opposite to those of the buyers. This is a significant difference from the mainstream home purchase market, where generally the buyer and the seller both have the incentive to see the transaction succeed.

Reliable data about the prevalence of land contract sales is not readily available. According to the U.S. Census, 3.5 million people were buying a home through a land contract in 2009, the last year for which such data is available. But this number likely understates the prevalence of land contracts, as many contract buyers do not understand the nature of their transaction sufficiently to report it.

Evidence suggests that land contracts are making a resurgence in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. An investigative report by the Star Tribune found that land contract sales in the Twin Cities had increased 50% from 2007 to 2013. Recent reports from The New York Times and Bloomberg reveal growing interest from private equity-backed investors in using land contracts to turn a profit on the glut of foreclosed homes in blighted cities around the country.

Few states have laws addressing the problems with land installment contracts, and the state laws on the books are generally insufficient to protect consumers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has the mandate to regulate and prevent unfair and deceptive practices in the consumer mortgage marketplace, but has not yet used this authority to address the problems with land installment contracts. (1-2, footnotes omitted)

This report shines light on this disturbing development in the housing market and describes the history of predatory land contracts in communities of color since the 1930s. It also shows how their use was abetted by credit discrimination: communities of color were redlined by mainstream lenders who were following policies set by the Federal Housing Administration and other government agencies.

The report describes how these contracts give the illusion of home ownership:

  • They are structured to fail so that the seller can resell the property to another unsuspecting buyer.
  • They shift the burden of major repairs to the buyer, without exposing the seller to claims that the homes breach the warranty of habitability that a landlord could face from a tenant.
  • They often have purchase prices that are far in excess of comparable properties on the regular home purchase market, a fact that is often masked by the way that land contract payments are structured.
  • The properties often have title problems, like unsatisfied mortgages, that would not have passed muster in a traditional sale of a house.
  • They often are structured to avoid consumer protection statutes that had been enacted in response to previous problems with land contracts.

The report identifies Wall Street firms, like Apollo Global Management, that are funding these businesses. It also proposes a variety of regulatory fixes, not least of which is to have the CFPB take an active role in this shadowy corner of the housing market.

This is all to the good, but I really have to wonder if we are stuck just treating the symptoms of income and wealth inequality. Just as it is hard to imagine how we could regulate ourselves out of the problems faced by tenants that were described in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, it is hard to imagine that we can easily rid low-income communities of bottom feeders who prey on dreams of homeownership with one scheme or another. It is good, of course, that the National Consumer Law Center is working on this issue, but perhaps we all need to reach for bigger solutions at the same time that we try to stamp out this type of abusive behavior.

Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up

  • Citylab finds that urban farmers and real estate developers are teaming up in an unlikely alliance to create housing which incorporates on site food production, the latest in trendy, locavore hip.
  • Enterprise Community Partners has launched a national sign on letter to oppose Cuts, lift spending caps and restore funding to the Home Investment Partnership Program (HOME). HOME, according to Enterprise, is “the only Federal Housing Program exclusively focused on providing states and localities flexible gap financing for affordable housing development” for the low and very low income populations (seniors, the disabled, etc.)
  • New York Times editorial argues that the relief promised to homeowners facing foreclosure only materialized for banks, who unloaded toxic loans on the government, and private equity firms, who are now purchasing loans back from the government, at a discount and continuing  to foreclose.
  • National Association of Realtors finds that most Zombie homes (think unoccupied – long term vacancy) are not foreclosures but owned free and clear of mortgages.