Capitalism is reshaping the property market, locking younger generations out of buying somewhere to live and expecting us to be happy about it
The year is 2070. Nobody owns a home any more; the concept of individuals possessing property has gone the way of the floppy disk. Instead, a few large corporations control all the world’s real estate and people “subscribe” to holistic housing solutions on their iPhone 78X in the same way they currently subscribe to Netflix. You can pay your monthly subscription in billionaire-backed cryptocurrency: BezosCoin, MuskCoin or ZuckCoin. If you default on your housing sub (nobody uses old-fashioned terms such as “rent” any more) you are dispatched to Mars to pay off your debt via indentured servitude in intergalactic Amazon warehouses.
I’m not saying that’s exactly how things are going to be in 50 years (the warehouses may well be on Jupiter), but, without major policy changes, it looks depressingly as though that’s the way the housing market is headed. That is thanks to a number of interconnected trends – the first of which is the proliferation of the corporate landlord. Ever since the last financial crisis, institutional investors such as private equity companies have been scooping up homes lost to foreclosure and reconfiguring the US housing market. A New York Times piece on the “$60bn housing grab by Wall Street” published last March noted that, before 2010, “institutional landlords didn’t exist in the single-family-rental market; now there are 25 to 30 of them”. The pandemic seems to have accelerated this corporate land grab. “If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund,” the Wall Street Journal reported a couple of months ago. “Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.” The piece quoted a real-estate consultant who estimated that “roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in”.
