Is Wall Street Buying Up Omaha

Is Wall Street Actually Buying Up Omaha?

By Angela Peters, The Home Girl, Keeping It... Real Estate!

I hear this one weekly from frustrated buyers. Wall Street is buying up all the houses, and that is why you cannot compete. So I checked the numbers, and it is not quite the villain people think.

Large institutional investors, the ones that own 100 or more homes, made up only about 1.2% of home purchases nationally last year, and that share has been shrinking since 2022. Blackstone alone has cut its single-family purchases by more than 90%. The hedge fund boogeyman is mostly a myth at this point.

Here is the real number worth knowing. Investors of every size, small landlords, flippers, and cash buyers included, still made up about one in five home purchases nationally. Most of that is not a corporation. It is your neighbor with an LLC.

I am a member of Omaha REIA, so I want to be straight with you here rather than pretend investors are the enemy. I love a good flipper. A flipper buys a rundown house, fixes it up, and sells it back to a first-time buyer like you. That is a win for everybody, including the neighborhood.

What concerns me more is the buy-and-hold crowd, the investors who purchase a starter home and never put it back on the market. That house is gone from the ownership pool for good, not just for a season.

And there is a second piece of this nobody talks about enough. Short-term rentals. Omaha currently has somewhere between 600 and 1,200 active Airbnb and VRBO listings, depending on which platform you count, and that number keeps climbing. Every one of those was a house or condo that could have gone to an owner-occupant instead of a weekend guest.

So when you are house hunting and feel like you keep losing to somebody else, here is who you are actually up against. It is rarely a hedge fund. It is a local investor, sometimes a great one who will fix the place up and hand it back to a buyer like you, and sometimes one who is about to turn your future home into a nightly rental listing.

Know your competition. Move fast, get your financing solid, and lean on a REALTOR who knows which of those two investors you are dealing with before you write the offer.

Angela Peters | The Home Girl, Keeping It... Real Estate 402.215.1529 | angela@thehomegirlne.com | NE 20110578 IA S73434000 REALTOR® | Realty ONE Group Sterling | Member, Omaha REIA

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