Three corporate landlords from out of state own over 19,000 homes for rent in metro Atlanta — nearly 11% of the entire single-family rental market — according to a new study by Georgia State University and Rutgers University researchers.
What’s more, the three companies — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners, and Amherst Holdings — effectively anonymize themselves as a protection from legal liability or tenant accountability, “using an extensive network of more than 190 corporate aliases registered to 74 different addresses across ten states and one territory,” according to findings from GSU professor Taylor Shelton and Rutgers professor Eric Seymour, published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
The report, “Horizontal Holdings: Untangling the Networks of Corporate Landlords,” contextualizes the unsettling discovery that Wall Street and private equity investors account for more than a third of the recent single-family home purchases in the metro region. Their incursion has contributed to the drastic decline of intown housing affordability, leaving many prospective Atlanta homebuyers unable to beat cash offers from deep-pocketed investors.
In Atlanta’s core metro counties of Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and Clayton, the researchers discovered that Invitation Homes owns 7,861 homes, Pretium Partners controls 7,171, and Amherst Holdings has 4,061.
The report presents a potential strategy for local and state governments to better track the practices of corporate landlords. In the city of Atlanta especially, officials have struggled to track down private property owners when renters raise landlord-tenant issues, such as safety concerns regarding housing conditions.
That’s because corporate landlords tend to hide their identities beneath layers of limited liability companies — or shell companies.
Shelton and Seymour harnessed publicly available property tax data to follow strings of LLCs…
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