IMF News ... Friday, 21 July 2017
Back in February, Freddie Mac CEO Don Layton told Inside The GSEs that the mortgage giant was eyeing the single-family rental market.
“We have been looking into it and we are in consultation with the FHFA about the right way to go into it and we do have some transactions, which will eventually come out,” Layton said.
It now appears that Freddie is ready to make its move. According to a report in The New York Times, the GSE will finance mid-sized rental landlords – and not the giant SFR operators like Invitation Homes…
The GSEs have been providing liquidity to the multifamily housing market for years and some observers believe SFRs are more or less the same. But are they ?
An argument can be made that corporate landlords like Invitation Homes are taking inventory off the home-buying market and turning it into rentals…
Meanwhile, home values are continuing to rise in such red hot markets as California, leaving some commentators to wonder whether certain members of the millennial generation will ever be able to buy a home.
Stephen Pizzo, a financial journalist and real estate investor who lives in Northern California, said he sees a crisis. “Thanks to my real estate-minded grandparents and parents, we are fortunate to own seven homes, which is good news for my kids, since so few in that generation can afford a California home. So they’re not impacted.
But tens of millions of others are, and I have no idea what can be done about it, short of the state engaging in a Soviet-style plan to build massive multi-unit compounds. That’s not an attractive option.” Wait a second. Not an attractive option ?
President Trump is close to the Russians, so maybe a Soviet-style plan would work. After all, Trump is/was a builder. Just a thought. (Point of disclosure: Steve, I and Mary Fricker co-authored “Inside Job, the Looting of America’s Savings and Loans” back in the late 1980s.)
