Empty Houses

In bond jargon, MBS went “no-bid.” No buyers for MBS.

The halcyon days of 2020 and 2021 when banks were paying you to borrow money may be coming to an end. Maybe we’ll see real estate become assets again, and the mortgage you took out to buy that real estate go back to being the liability, instead of the other way around as it has been for a couple of years now.

30 year fixed mortgage rates today are about 270bps over the benchmark 10 year Treasury as of this writing (5.85% vs. 3.165%). If we need to get to real bond yields before investors want to buy bonds, that implies a 10 year Treasury somewhere north of 8.6%. That in turn implies mortgage rates north of 11%. (All of that assumes you believe the 8.6% CPI print.)

https://notoriousrob.com/2022/06/finally-no-bid-on-mbs/

Housing Market: Could This Be Worse Than 2008?

Nick Gerli, in his interview with Wealthion, alludes to a number of figures which spell trouble for the residential market. If you own real estate or we’re considering entering the market soon, it’s worth checking out:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-06-09/housing-market-could-be-worse-2008

from zh comments

like Europe, they will move to choke off developments outside of the cities, force everyone into apartments as much as possible, then mass transit plans, bikes, etc.
Plays into the green delirium syndrome.

Rents are going up, If you won’t pay your rent, you can go live in a tent and an immigrant with section 8 funding will move in.

Could this be worse than 2008?
Take 2008 then….
add 50% MOAR in mortgage fraud
add another 1-2 trillion + in bad student loans
add another trillion in bad auto loans
add a few trillion in additional new debt
add 10 million indigent illegal aliens to 2008
sell a few trillion in US assets to foreigners
The average American IQ has dropped so much from 3rd world low IQ immigration and human husbandry (paying idiots to breed) we can’t vote ourselves out of this problem, Americans are simply too stupid to not vote for their own invasion and debt slavery, even if they did our crooked govt would simply cheat and fix elections.

Real unemployment according to shadowstats.com is 25%. The 3.5% unemployment rate refers to people still receiving unemployment compensation. Assuming it’s not a completely fictional number.

What bothers me is the fact that if someone comes along and offers me five to ten times what my place is worth, even with the prospect of being homeless, I’ll still have to sell. The Blackrock people know this.

You’re in Virginia. You can easily go down to your local county land records office and find out who owns these houses, whether it is an individual or a corporate LLC. Your land records might be online, too. Much of Virginia is. It’s all public record, too.

Find out who owns these places and you have another brick from that wall. Maybe even tell your long-time readers what you discovered, too.

My own guess is that the houses are being bought on a low fixed-rate mortgage and the buyers are banking on high- or even hyper-inflation effectively wiping out the debt in a few years’ time. So the real price of the purchase will just be the cost of servicing the interest for a year or so until inflation works its “magic”. This makes economic sense even if the market value of the house is likely to fall significantly in a hyper-inflationary depression, since the up-front cash outlay is relatively small.

Remember also that we’re soon going to “own nothing and be happy” so those of us who are still alive will need to become renters.

Hi Eric

You made it into ZH comments…..

3 hours ago

And why wouldn’t houses be unaffordable, with Blackrock in the competition – Blackrock reportedly flush with $10 trillion – not billion – in assets “under management”?

Empty houses

“…it gives me the creeps to see them just sitting there, unoccupied – and thinking about who (about what) might have bought them, more than a year ago.?…And why.

“these houses that have been selling that no one’s living in…”

quote from…… eric peters autos

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/these-are-worlds-10-least-affordable-housing-markets

“enserfment”…what a wonderful word. No telling what an insane company with trillions of dollars like Blackrock has in mind. The people running such operations must get supremely bored. They run out of things to buy because none of it satisfies their arrogance and lust for eternal power and control. Maybe they are trying to turn the world into a giant Monopoly game. Look at gates? He’s the poster child for the tyrannically insane parasites which many billionaires have become. Tons of fake money and nothing else that would make them humans again.

Eric,
After the Removal of Trump, My kids on the couch for 2 years, we decided to get out of the urban hell hole that is SE FL. Found a rural property in N Fl. After the purchase it sat unoccupied several months as we were not ready to uproot but felt the window for buying was closing. Owning 2 homes and maintaining them is not easy. I will bet the new buyers are using the houses as their escape plan. All major urban areas will soon uninhabitable as supply chains fail.

SW VA is nice country; been looking to move (back) to the Appalachians; maybe I should look into becoming a volunteer house-sitter (‘squatter’ sounds so tacky); I’m wondering … would the local sheriff care as long as I paid the taxes and kept the yard mowed?

Larry Fink of Blackrock is a WEF member. He may be purchasing these properties to fulfill the “You will own nothing and be happy” agenda.

This appears that the practice of blockbusting is still alive and well.

‘Foreclosure Fraud 2.0…’

“… if Foreclosure Fraud 2.0 visits Main Street soon, much also will be similar to the 2008 to 2014 time period. This is because the underlying problem in 2008–62 million fatally void securitized mortgages–has never been remedied. […]

PROOF THAT THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HATES YOU” …

https://www.williambernardbutler.com/foreclosure-fraud-2-0/

The more I think of this, the more things that come to mind – Like how the tax code (particularly in the UK) actually supports and favors this kind of thing. For example, when I ended up buying an extra property I was classified as one of those evil “rich” people – and therefore had to pay an additional tax of 3% of the purchase price (on top of the already heavy transfer tax). Then, if I rent it out, again I’m an evil rich person therefore I am not allowed expenses for the mortgage on the rental property (and effectively the gross rental amount is added to my taxable income).. On the other hand if I was set up as a corporate, none of these taxes would apply to me!!! Its almost as if the whole thing was set up about 5 or so years ago to clear way for the likes of blackrock or others to start buying…. you know so eventually we all “own nothing and are happy”

Once you’re in their rental, they’ll tell you that it’s “mandatory” for you to get the lethal injection. Someday… we will all love the smell of burning flesh in the morning.

Eric, in most states, you can find out the status of a property by going to the county assessor’s web site. It’s how those with tax liens are found out, and picked up, often for VERY CHEAP. If you see the owner is a Real Estate Investment Trust, well, there’s your answer.

Don’t expect to see “Blackrock” or any of these massive capital management firms listed openly; they set up shell companies for that specific purpose. This is how Disney, starting about 1961 when Walt decided to build Disney World in Central Florida, bought up all that land near Orlando. Disney’s real estate arm had about twenty-five or so companies set up, each buying property as they could, but in that manner, the local realtors weren’t tipped off; so someone couldn’t grab a choice piece of land, say, off the then-new Interstate 4, and become a “holdout”, making a killing. Disney didn’t actually announce their plans to build the new park until 1965, just before Walt passed on, when all the necessary property had been acquired.

The first all rental single family house new construction subdivision is going thru planning in a local community near me. There is opposition to it being all rental, as there is every time any large apartment complex is proposed (some towns now prohibit apartment complexes). It will likely be built as there is nothing that can block it, as this form of rental is new to here.

I’m actually surprised they are asking permission to make it all rental. If I was developing such a thing, I would just go thru planning as a single family subdivision and just not sell the houses as they are built and just rent them out. By the time most folks figure it out, it would be likely there would be little they could do about it. It would likely be mostly built out at that point.

Its also interesting that billionaires like Bill Gates are buying thousands of acres of farmland. Something is afoot and it ain’t good.

Any clingers to their property will find their neighboring homes filled with multiple families of diverse Section 8 renters, as homogeneous suburbs and rural areas are racist.

Or they’ll do what the Bolsheviks did to the kulaks, and just raise property taxes continually and then evict them from avoiding taxes.

What are the adverse possession laws like in Virginia? Such abandoned homes should be put to good use. Successful adverse possession should be followed with perfection of the title (i.e documenting the history of ownership back as far as possible to establish a clear chain of ownership and make sure their are no unsettled liens).

‘Apparently, BlackRock has been “investing” in private homes – even whole neighborhoods, which it has financial wherewithal to do.’ — eric

Who enabled BlackRock to do this? Look no further than the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, which contains $2.7 trillion of mortgage-backed securities (9th line in the table):

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/default.htm

To date, it’s a classic “divide and conquer” scheme. Homeowners, and those in property-related businesses, benefited. Renters, by contrast, got screwed up the wazoo.

But as the Federal Reserve throws its Bubble machine into reverse gear next week and starts shedding MBS, everybody starts to lose.

Never has the case been stronger not only to abolish the Federal Reserve, but also to indict its governing board for counterfeiting, fraud, larceny and conspiracy.

Woody Wilson’s unconstitutional Federal Reserve is a malevolent engine of destruction, whose illicit monetary artillery now is demolishing American living standards. Shut the sucker down.

It is absolutely repugnant that these billion and trillion dollar corporations can buy swaths of land and towns and homes. It is very unAmerican, at least in a traditional America. This practice should be banned or regulated HEAVILY! Dark forces are at play here, and that is not hyperbole.

Unoccupied houses are targeted by Squatters. Once those are in there, exercising their “Squatter’s Rights”, the investment companies are going to have an even bigger problem on their hands.

Melissa Dykes (“Truthstream Media”) did a relevant documentary recently: This Is a Housing Crisis.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/fhq0VLYTqEo/

It’s overlong, and a tad repetitive, but the high production values make it worthwhile to watch the whole thing. In short, the film depicts what the intended fate of gentiles after the Great Reset is going to look like. Namely, it will look like the sprawling squalor of mega-homeless encampments, and dilapidated old hotels repurposed as “shelters,” filled with squatters and human revenants.

Blackstone is buying up all residential real estate to drive up prices and rents, and price out all working people from even basic housing. This swelling market also drives up property taxes, by increasing assessments. It’s a systematic push to dispossess the goyim, with no mercy, and no quarter. Dispossession by artificial housing-cost-inflation is just one of the many fronts of the low-intensity war being waged against the masses, along with “health protocols” (social distancing/vaxx-passes), “war with Russia” (energy-price inflation), “carbon rationing,” etc.

Sooner or later, every single one of us will be broken financially. How long you hang on to the roof over your head is just a function of how far below your means you have lived up to this point. But sooner or later, every single goy will be dispossessed either by rent-hikes or tax-hikes, in combination with the fuel-and-food inflation that is going to strip us all bare. It’s all an automated process. A machine.

The short of it all is: you have to pay to live in this satanic world. You struggle to hang on until you fall off. The Machine is going to dog our heels right to the grave. Once they’ve got you on the streets, then they come at you with “health ordinances” and “vagrancy laws” to hound you relentlessly from camp to camp. (Cf. Grapes of Wrath, where “Typhus Outbreaks” were the go-to pretext for the Pinkertons and sheriffs to clear out the Okie camps.) When you’ve been run completely ragged, desperate for any relief, all your meager personal effects confiscated or left behind to be burned, then, they’ll say you have to go to one of their mega-shelters. It’s that or jail. Whether you choose the mega-shelter or jail, you will have to be injected. “For safety,” of course.

The Great Reset is a bulldozer, operating on every level of society and the economy, to crush and drive out the gentiles, just like every genocidal campaign of YHWH in the Torah.

Joshua 11:21-22: “And Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel, Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel.”

Now, all the world is Israel, and we are all Anakim. And YHWH has taken the form of a mechanized, computerized, automated banking and government combine. YHWH has emerged as a Machine—precision-engineered to wipe us all out, in genuinely biblical fashion.

I live in a triple masked Blue New England state and desperately began searching for rural properties out West in Wyoming/Idaho/Utah when The Madness began(I will never call the terrible lie a pandemic). I was meeting with unmasked realtors by July of 2020.

I was certain I’d beat the crowds. Nope. Inventory was gone and prices were parabolic. And the same strange corporate involvement was echoed by several of the Realtors who had been in the local markets for 20-30+ years. They had never seen these oddly structured corporations outbidding little ‘ol me by 50k just ’cause. The actual people the Realtors were dealing with often never saw or wanted to inspect the homes. They were almost all shell corporations supposedly going to “rent” the homes out but often never would when I’d follow up a year later.

And these weren’t typical vacation or scenic spots either. Places like Casper Wy and Idaho Falls, ID, and Cody Wy.

Fuckery is afoot.

Eric, you should be able to go on the county auditors website and see who bought the house.

I believe you are spot-on, Eric.

Although the estimate of my home price is the highest it’s ever been, estimates of FUTURE value have waned, and thus companies such as Opendoor have cut their offers significantly. Though, those offers still aren’t bad!

I FINALLY finished my sewer line, and can finally back-fill and move. I’m now a plumber as well as a scientist and programmer! So very prestigious.

I think the Fed’s increase in interest rates, and the subsequent increase in mortgage rates, is all about pricing the “little guy” out of the market and consequently capping housing prices. This, as is surmised in this article, allows the big corporations to buy up all the houses and make renters (serfs) out of everyone.

This is just “you’ll own nothing and be happy” in action, the destruction of the middle class. Most everyone’s most valuable asset is their house, so if the PTB can eventually own all the housing it will complete the transition back to the middle ages they so desperately want. We’ll be serfs forever paying rent to the overlords with nothing left to pass onto your children.

Chyna also has a problem with real estate speculation. Whole cities are built and sold but never occupied. This is what happens when theres too much money floating around with no sane or safe place to invest it.
Sounds like an opportunity to go shopping for cheap materials and appliances. Or if you’re forced to be homeless and really have to go feral pull a north pond hermit or barefoot bandit on these places.
Stick a fork in it, this place is done.

Normally I’d say that Blackrock is going the way of Zillow, -i.e. hastily buying up RE at top dollar and then having nowhere to go- but….what with Blackrock almost being a defacto government agency, I’d say they not only know what they are doing (Something nefarious is in the works, in which these houses will be put to use)- and the cost is likely being borne by tax slaves).

Bad thing about your area too, Eric, is that you are close to I-81, which means that it is prime territory for escapees from the NY-DC corridor. When those people ‘bug out’ (the ones who have bought second homes there, for future use) the whole character of that area will quickly change.

Larry Summers just published a paper under the auspices of the NBER. The National Bureau of Economic Research is a group of egghead PhD Econs, who officially decide when recessions started and ended — usually about a year after the fact.

Here’s Larry’s conclusion:

‘In its pre-1983 form, shelter inflation would decline mechanically as interest rate increases
subsided, adding fuel to rapid disinflations.

‘[But] with private sector rent growth currently still at 16 percent, residential inflation is likely to move toward 7 percent by the end of 2022, contributing almost 3 percentage points to core CPI inflation.

‘Compared to previous inflationary cycles, housing will thus serve as a significant hindrance to rapid disinflation, whereas it used to move the official series substantially lower.’

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30116/w30116.pdf

What’s this mean for us?

By using an unresponsive measure of housing cost called OER (Owners Equivalent Rent), the Federal Reserve will be obliged to tighten longer and harder to quell inflation (as now measured), compared to the pre-1983 definition of inflation.

This increases the likelihood that the Fed, using a delayed-reaction speedometer, will brake too hard and send the eclownomy plunging into recession.

Geniuses, I tell ya!

Why is all of this happening?

Received three phone calls yesterday from Harriet. She wanted to know if there was interest in rent to own. We own our home, why would we sell to rent to own? Besides, as soon as you sign the papers, you are then subject to eviction. So you lose your home after you sell to rent to own. Makes no sense. Nobody is that dumb.

I get so many scam calls on the land line, it is an indication that something is up. I say hello, no answer, click. I am going to answer and say ‘Acme Tools’ from now on.

Looks like homeowners are being targeted for some reason.

BlackRock is 680 USD per share. In 1999, BlackRock was 17 USD per share. The dividend is 19.72 USD per share. 2.9 percent return on your invested dollars is okay, but not great.

If you own 1000 shares and paid 17,000 dollars to buy the shares in 1999, you receive 19 grand each year in dividends, unearned income.

The cheapskates can’t even pay a dividend of 40 dollars per share or even more. There are many REITS that pay good dividends at prices much less than BlackRock’s. It is more or less a REIT, BlackRock buys REIT stocks.

BlackRock must think people are willing to be duped.

Joe lives in the White House and doesn’t have to pay to stay there. BlackRock should buy the White House and make Joe pay rent. Larry Fink could then evict the bum and leave the White House sit empty. What really needs to be done like right now.

Larry Fink would evict his own mother.

I think what happened was very logical – the Fed is buying trillions of Mortgage Backed Securities and wealthy investors are looking to park their money somewhere beside a bank savings account or short term treasuries (mutual money market also) that pay far less than 1%, like 0.05%.

In some countries interest rates went negative.

So what to do? Where does capital go when the Federal Reserve is buying private mortgages and driving rates down to histerical lows of 3%? The stock market for one, and real estate is another and third is gold.

Blackrock – like other maligned ETF’s – often come late in the feeding frenzy and are now getting their asses handed to them. Zillow had been overpaying for thousands of homes – because the damn fools believed their own rosy forecasts – as if those geniuses never heard of a real estate cycle. Like 1929 they were convinced we were in a new era, prices could not go down.

“Genius” stock pickers have daily Youtube shows like this clown Cathy Woods who got lucky because she bought meme stocks. Meme stocks went up – and her ARKK fund full of them went up too – and everyone got one their knees to worship the goddess of stock pickers. But now her luck has run out, the high tech goldies like Tesla are getting hammered and ARKK keeps going down, see this chart:

https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com enter ticker symbol ARKK and go to 3 year chart

I would remind the readers that the Wall Street Journal would pick stocks at the beginning of each new year with the stock section pasted to the wall and throwing darts. Those random picks beat the professional fund managers every single time.

At the end of the mania it was an elevator ride up then the cables got cut – and the ARKK fund is now freefalling. Stocks lead housing. Housing takes longer to respond and this young Youtuber has the finger on the pulse:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ReventureConsulting/videos

So if you study real estate, the sure sign of a coming crash is rapidly building inventory which is happening now. And since the upwave was so huge from Fed insanity – you can expect an equally large crash.

The magnitude of what the Fed does is truly mind staggering, they bought $2,800,000,000,000 of home mortgages – and now those fools are stuck with them.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSHOMCB

IMO the bust could be epic on a Biblical level event.

hi Eric

Here is a blog where they talk about the housing bubble…..

peak house was when the snow and FOMO were flying in February. Below is a sampling of the toll since then – in only a dozen weeks.

And within those large and oft-heavily-populated areas, the blood is flowing. These stats also came before the outsized Bank of Canada rate hike on Wednesday – with many more surprises to come. Here are the percentage price declines from peak (Feb) to the end of May, for example, in Halton:

Brampton -16% (from 1.6m to 1.355m)
Mississauga – 12.6% (from 1.92m to 1.67m)
Oakville -18.7% (from $2.37m to 1.93m)
Burlington -13% (from 1.8m) to 1.58m)
Milton -15% (from 1.7m to 1.4m)
.
To the east, average sale prices in Durham Region have tanked by at least $200,000, and in some cases by more than $400,000 in this brief period of time. It means someone who (for example) bought in Whitby in February for $1.55 million and closed the deal last month now lives in a house worth $1.1 million. If they put 15% down ($232,000 plus closing costs) they have a mortgage that exceeds the value of the home by a staggering $200,000. In other words, all equity was erased and they owe more than they own. Disaster.

https://www.greaterfool.ca/2022/06/03/the-surrender/

Once owned a beach house on Galveston Island and the rule of thumb was the more expensive the property the less it was occupied. Million dollar properties that never were used. Maybe investments or corporate money, but the corrosive environment of gulf coast is not a place where properties can sit and not turn shit. Add in taxes, insurance and the occasional hurricane that wipes the coast clean, and it adds up to a hole in the sand where you shovel in money. Never could figure it out.

When I bought my house, I was up against some kind of investor, I don’t know who exactly. Well, anyway, they offered more money than I did. The house was part of an estate. Anyway they sold it to me (they didn’t even counter my offer although I was expecting them to) because I was going to actually live in it and “it’s what Dad (a Korea vet) would have wanted.”

I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten it, and I also consider it evidence that there are a lot of very decent and compassionate people out there.

I don’t know who the investor was, but I hope it was Blackrock (or equivalent). I don’t take issue with a person who buys a couple houses and rents them out for some income, but what the megacorps are doing feels criminal (even if it technically isn’t).

In the last 5-years especially the last 2-years, nothing happens in a marketplace in the new Ameria without some sort of human manipulation going on behind the scenes. Blackrock is doing this to control the marketplace. Housing is like food, everyone needs shelter. I foresee some sort of *Public-Private* deal to be made down the road and the renters better vote Blue or else.

In any case, a house empty is a house falling down. A simple thing goes unnoticed, like a small roof leak, and the next thing you know termites have torn the place down. Termites love wood, especially when they can get a drink on site. Or there’s storm damage. Or the basement develops a leak, or a crack. Or Rats find their way in, and proceed to turn it into an ideal rat environment. Problems don’t typically get better with age.
Perhaps Black Rock et al are not familiar with such problems. Perhaps they assume that a house is a fixed asset, that automatically maintains its value outside of market forces.

I’ve often said that Aspen real estate is the modern equivalent of Yap Island stone money. Rich folks pay millions of dollars for houses they might use once or twice a year, if at all. But that’s not the point. It’s a place to park money with relatively little expense. They trade houses amongst themselves as needed, and there’s a clear ledger avilable to figure out who owns what. Most of the real estate is owned by LLCs set up specifically for the property, so when looking up a deed it will show something like “123 main street LLC” as the owner. This is done to protect the other assets of the real owner and probably a tax dodge.

https://flockeo.com/en/yap-the-island-where-people-pay-in-stone-money/

Interesting that the Austrian school theory of money inflation is playing out exactly as expected. When the printing presses run, those who have first access to the newly minted money are able to outbid everyone else, driving up asset prices. Instead of fighting it out in Aspen and Vail, they’re branching out to take “second tier” properties from those of us who aren’t connected to the treasury/FED pipeline. I have to wonder if MMT includes this phenomenon into their theory?

As for Blackrock et al converting single family homes into rentals (and developing whole subdivisions as rentals), that’s just an indicator that automation and property management software has reached the point where it makes sense to run an operation nationally. Traditionally property management has been small and local because it doesn’t scale easily. By leveraging workforce automation software it becomes possible (and likely profitable, but who knows) to centralize operations. Most likely they’re able to sub out most of the maintenance with companies like ServPro and big HVAC companies, and beat them up on price better than an individual who might own a few properties.

The road to serfdom?

“Ghost houses” (Google about the phenomenon), purchased by Chinese families as investments are not uncommon on the West Coast or here in Austin, but that demographic is averse to places like The Woods since they buy into hype form the American media about people who live there as being “Deliverance” on steroids.

What are the long range plans for the toll road pushing north from Charlotte on I77? I’ve been out of that business for a few years, now, but I remember NCTA had pretty extensive plans for expansion once upon a time.

‘the Thing’s uncontrolled demolition of the economy triggered a rise in interest rates – which appears to have popped this bubbly real-estate market.’ — eric

It’s not only the doubling of mortgage rates, but also its rapidity that creates a shock to the economy. When mortgage rates were on a roller coaster during peak inflation from 1978 to 1982, we had not one but TWO back-to-back recessions.

Then there’s the simultaneous oil shock and natural gas shock:

‘Lone Star State residents signing new contracts in June 2022 are paying 18.48 cents per kilowatt hour—10.5 cents more than the average rate they were paying in June 2021, 7.98 cents.’

‘Rising power bills are primarily due to the soaring price of natural gas. About 45% of Texas’ grid is powered by natgas.’ – Houston Chronicle via ZH

How are them EVs workin’ out for y’all now?

Eric: Since renters never own.

If I had to pay rent, car payments, etc. I would have been unable to resist the .gov coercion to get the jab. As I’ve lived a life with more of a 19’th century approach (save, invest and be prepared for harsh times) I’ve been able to say NO!!! to their demands and live my life as much as I can get away with it. Bad times are coming and I’m hoping people get ready before it arrives.

PS- Love the Keeeeve mask.

“It should be easy”

I recall reading back in 2007 – 20012 or so that even banks didn’t know who owned certain mortgages.
As a result, some home-owers even got a free house.
Not many, but some.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if ownership today was a little hazy & not so easy to find out. I dunno though, I stopped keeping up with the madness in that sector.

It should be easy to find out who owns those properties as the sales are consummated and recorded. Typically, the owners of the homes/property as well as the details of the transaction are a public record, sometimes easily searchable online, as in the case in my county. Of course the owner could be an entity such as an LLC or corporation, in which case you could dig further into the publicly available info about who owns or is involved with them.

I get offers to buy my home from “Ella” who works for an “investor” in the area. Yeah, right. It is my rental house. When I bought this place, I had no idea that this was going on, but there is something nefarious. Complanies like Black Rock and others have an unlimited access to capital through the securities “markets.” The moment their balance sheet starts going “south,” look for them to get “bailed out,” reorganized and for them to appear under another name. Of course, they probably won’t go “south” this time as these business criminals are allowed to loot from the public, their investors (private individual stockholders and 401ks) in plain view. Only a nuke headed to Washington DC is going to solve this issue. Eric, you might want to vacate the area. It’s truly disgusting.

Very interesting Eric – this has been a phenomenon in London for over a decade now – central london (and even parts of Greater London now ) is full of shiny new tower blocks where even studios are over half a mil. But drive by the tower after dark and less than 10% of the lights are on. We were told it was black money from Asia, Africa and Russia, people looking for a place to park black money. But why rural America….