Longtime Realtor: Here’s what Charlotte sellers must do to thwart corporate landlords

Earlier this year, I made the decision to say good-bye to real estate sales. After 19 long years, which included the Great Recession and housing crisis, I reached the conclusion that the current housing mess will not be correcting itself any time soon and it was time to see myself out.

In fact, I fear that — if left to itself — a correction may never happen.

The reality is that what we used to refer to as “The American Dream” is becoming a possibility for far too few of us. Owning a home provides a sense of permanence — a shared investment in our community, as well as a means of inter-generational wealth transfer from grandparents to parents to children and beyond.

Being a Realtor meant so much more to me than just opening a door or writing a contract. I genuinely loved being an advocate for my clients and my community, promoting the good of homeownership while sounding the alarm when problems arose.

During the Great Recession (2008 through 2012), I worked mostly with distressed homeowners who faced with the unenviable task of what to do with a house they could no longer afford. When I wasn’t spending late nights alone at my office working on files, I was traveling the country teaching other Realtors how to help owners in their communities — often for free. I thought I was doing good for our country.

Then, around 2012, the institutional investors started appearing in Charlotte, Raleigh and other parts of the state. To their credit, they helped provide a floor to our housing market — often purchasing homes at market value and rarely negotiating. The real estate community saw them as a godsend, as homes that once took six months to sell could now close for cash in less than a month.

We didn’t question where they came from or who they were, and speculation at the time was that they would hold the homes for a few years and then sell once the market turned.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Thanks to books like “Homewreckers,” by Aaron Glantz, “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein, and groundbreaking journalism by The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Charlotte Observer, we know that much of the predatory behavior that was pervasive before and during the Great Recession continues today. It manifests in institutional investors coming into communities of color and buying up large pockets of affordable homes.

Even as I look at my own neighborhood, many of our neighbors are forced to pay rent that is substantially higher than an equivalent mortgage because institutional investors have driven up rental rates faster than their incomes are able to keep up.

It is so disheartening to talk to neighbors who are renting. Some say they’ve given up on the prospect of ever owning a home because they find it difficult to compete against the corporations.

Are institutional investors solely to blame for our current housing shortage? Of course not.

What we are experiencing is a perfect storm of many factors: millennials desiring homeownership, not enough construction, as well as corporate investors seizing on the opportunity to lock tenants into renting for as long as possible. It has become clear to me that homeownership by individuals has become the biggest adversary to institutional investors.

For the last few years, my rallying cry to my fellow Realtors has been to encourage their sellers to sell their homes to people and not corporations. Our housing market is healthiest when humans own homes and not corporations that are actively seeking to intermediate would-be owners from the goal of homeownership.