The largest corporate owners are at saturation,” says Eric Seymour, a Rutgers associate professor who studies private equity in the housing market. “Some of the largest actors, like Invitation Homes and Blackstone, grew to scale in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis when they are able to buy large numbers of homes at low costs. That window has closed.”
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Eric Seymour
Corporations are buying more homes in NJ, what that means to families
The largest corporate owners are at saturation,” says Eric Seymour, a Rutgers associate professor who studies private equity in the housing market. “Some of the largest actors, like Invitation Homes and Blackstone, grew to scale in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis when they are able to buy large numbers of homes at low costs. That window has closed.”
NJSPL Report: Investor Acquisition of Residential Properties
Corporate ownership of single-family homes and other small residential properties has drawn growing concern from housing advocates and policymakers in New Jersey and nationally. Between 2012 and 2022, corporate ownership of 1–4-unit residential properties more than doubled in the Garden State.
No, BlackRock Isn’t Buying All the Houses—Here’s What’s Really Driving Up Your Rent
Professor Eric Seymour of Rutgers University says the claims have fueled “imprecision around the issue, in part stemming from the confusion between Blackstone and BlackRock, for instance.”
After Stafford mobile home landlord jacked up rent 20%, is rent control the answer?
“Rents are the high, and they’ve gone up quite a bit, particularly since the pandemic,” said Eric Seymour, a Rutgers University professor who co-authored a study looking at rent control in New Jersey. “And so there’s interest in understanding the policy levers available to try to keep rents manageable.”
NJSPL: Mapping Corporate Landlords in New Jersey
Using parcel-level property tax data, we tracked changes in ownership from 2012 to 2022 to understand where corporate landlords are active, how they are acquiring properties, and what this might mean for housing access and stability.
NJSPL: Georeferencing Historical Maps for Geospatial Analysis
As part of ongoing research to create a dataset of historical water bodies in New Jersey, researchers have begun locating and charting these historical water bodies with the use of atlases from the David Rumsey Map Collection. The digitized maps in these atlases were then georeferenced, a process of determining the precise location of these maps on the Earth’s surface. The ultimate goal is to trace water bodies in order to evaluate flood vulnerability across the state.
NJSPL: Examining Property Transitions in New Jersey
Approximately 19% of Trenton’s one- to four-unit housing properties transitioned to corporate ownership between 2012 and 2022, totaling just over 4,000 properties in the Garden State capital. Researchers have been in the process of examining corporate home ownership in New Jersey, in particular how much exists today and which communities have the highest or fastest-growing rates of corporate and other investor ownership in the past decade.
Senator’s Probe into Corporate Landlords in Georgia Echoes National Scrutiny of Institutional Investors
A 2024 paper by researchers Taylor Shelton of Georgia State University and Eric Seymour of Rutgers described “tangled webs of corporate property ownership which are to deliberately obscure the true ownership and concentration of such property from public view.”
Faculty Contribute to Wealth Disparity Task Force Report
Last week, in commemoration of Black History Month, Gov. Phil Murphy and Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way announced the release of the state’s Wealth Disparity Task Force report, “New Jersey – Building a State of Opportunity: A Report of the Wealth Disparity Task Force to Close Opportunity Gaps and Repair Structural Disparities.”