This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Saturday, December 23,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the boogie men for opponents of letting more people easily buy and sell homes, housing investors.

Edo's Vanessa Brown Calder details why the critics are mistaken and why this particular

boogie man is more symptom than cause of a largely irrational housing market.

We have a housing crunch in the United States and while many investors, small investors, big investors,

big investors, people who might want to own rental property someday.

They see this housing crunch and they realize,

well, I guess the window just closed on me buying a piece of rental

property because the prices of housing that should that would then be put out

as rentals it's just never coming back to earth.

And it's a, I mean for their sake it's a legitimate concern, but at the same time for renters,

that means restricted supply.

Absolutely, yeah, I think people are really worried right now and understandably so with the way that

the housing market has gone over the past few years and, you know, it hasn't come back down to earth and some

markets obviously have greater problems than others and there's been changes in demand and there's been in migration to various

localities across the United States and so a lot of pressure on housing markets right now. So one of the, I think you call it a boogie man in housing is institutional investors.

These are companies that own large a portfolio of either houses or apartment complexes or other housing,

how are they cast in people trying to lay some blame at their feet for problems in the

housing market?

Yeah, so the institutional investor narrative has been interesting.

It's sort of got going during the financial crisis and maybe took a break for a little while, but during the pandemic it came roaring back and there's

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