After accounting one out of four home sales in the depths of the housing recession and fueled turn-arounds in dozens of markets where waves of foreclosures and battered home values scared off other buyers, real estate investors today are playing a greatly diminished role in the housing recovery. Read More »

In another sign of institutional investors’ appetites for foreclosures, inventories of presale foreclosures have declined nearly twenty percent since last year as lenders have made volumes of foreclosures available via REO tapes to well-funded hedge funds eager to buy in bulk. Read More »

Nearly 4 million more single-family homes have been added to the rental market since 2005. This new supply has fully caught up with the increased rental demand during the housing crisis – causing single-family home rents to flatten nationwide. Read More »

Have real estate investments peaked? After years of growth during the Foreclosure Eva, investment purchases declined slightly last year after surging 64.5 percent in 2011. With the cost and competition to buy distress sales growing and prices for normal homes rising, will investors pull back and start cashing in their assets? Read More »

Thirty-eight real estate markets have been tagged as “dangerous” for investors looking to make money on buying homes as rental properties in new quarterly data compiled by HomeVestors of America (known as the “We Buy Ugly Houses®” company) and Local Market Monitor. Read More »

Last month the New Republic published a provocative article on hedge funds and real estate investing (<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112395/wall-street-hedge-funds-buy-rental-properties">Your New Landlord Works on Wall Street</a>) by former TV producer David Dayen. He said out loud what many people have been whispering. Read More »

The low prices that make foreclosures attractive to investors also make foreclosures toxic to communities and homeowners. The discount between “normal” priced homes and the prices paid for properties than have been through the foreclosure process can spell the difference between profit and loss to an investor at the same time that they drive real estate values into the ground. Read More »

Single family home tenants are 18 percent more likely than apartment tenants to stay in their current homes five years or longer, suggesting that demand for single family homes, the fastest growing rental category, will be more stable than multifamily demand, according to a new national opinion survey released today by Premier Property Management Group. Read More »

Expenditures on foreclosures and short sales drove the remodeling market in 2011, as investors spent more to rehabilitate each foreclosure they purchased to flip or rent than either lenders or owners who bought foreclosures to live in. However the rental share of overall spending on improvements has been shrinking since the housing bust. Read More »

Demand for foreclosures is so great and supplies are so low in some of the nation’s hottest foreclosure markets popular with investors that the price differences between REOs and full-price homes have virtually disappeared. Read More »