As CBS News Atlanta previously reported, more than one in four single-family rental homes in metro Atlanta are owned by large corporate investors — more than 72,000 homes — giving the region one of the highest concentrations of institutional ownership anywhere in the United States.

Housing advocates have argued that those companies can outbid families with cash offers, reducing the number of homes available to first-time buyers while contributing to higher home prices and rents.

Warnock has repeatedly cited those trends in pushing the legislation, saying corporate investors have increasingly treated homes as financial assets instead of places for families to live.

  • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
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    19 hours ago

    This does absolutely nothing. As others pointed out, they’ll just create new shells. Even if they lowered prices somehow it would be pointless. There is no money or jobs anymore.

    Obligatory:

          • ContriteErudite@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            Here’s a simple way to think about how email address lines work for business emails:

            To: The main audience. These are the people the message is intended for and who may need to respond or take action.

            Cc (Carbon copy): People who should stay informed but are not the main audience. Think of this as an FYI list. If someone in Cc has information that would help everyone, they can use Reply All and join the conversation.

            Bcc (Blind carbon copy): People who should receive the email without other recipients knowing they were included. Recipients in Bcc are hidden from everyone else and are not included in future replies unless someone adds them again. For instance, if you’re sending an announcement to a large group, you might put everyone in Bcc to keep their email addresses private and ensure that replies are sent to the original sender only. Another common use is keeping a manager informed without making them part of the ongoing email discussion.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      You didn’t expect this to actually fix the problem did you? Sorry, too much money to be made.

      • nosuchanon@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        I mean any progress is a step in the right direction. It just seems that these days are Democrats are very performative. Most of their legislation has no teeth and is just for show. Enforcement of any policies is basically none.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          Sounds about right, most policies are passed on their performative aspects. When you really sit down and read the law you often find the performative reason that was cited isn’t even true.

          • nosuchanon@lemmy.world
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            19 hours ago

            Unfortunately both sides do something similar, It seems that modern legislative practices lead to incredibly broad and poorly written policy that can be interpreted and almost any direction. I think it’s like that by design. But it’s so watered down and meaningless that it’s just a feel good title with a bunch of bullshit stuffed into it.

            • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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              19 hours ago

              Yes, I do believe this is done on purpose. This combined with shitty concepts like omnibus bills with riders ensures policy gets passed that should have never seen the light of the day.

              • nosuchanon@lemmy.world
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                19 hours ago

                I honestly can’t believe how much bullshit they stuff into the budget every year. I guess it’s just been accepted that every must pass tight Bill has to be stuffed chock full of the worst most vile stupid legislation ever. No politician wants to risk their career election campaign trying to pass some dystopian corporate bootlicker policies. So they just shove it every budget bill hoping that no one will read the thousands of pages to catch their loopholes.

    • tristynalxander@mander.xyz
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      5 hours ago

      There was some concern this was more of a bail out since the housing market is doing a weird quiet crash thing and private companies want out anyway. I’m not sure what ended up occurring, but I’m skeptical that it’s anything good.

    • ghen@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Hopefully they’re just being taxed at increased rates that make profit unviable and allows them to unload the houses normally. I don’t really know how the legislation works though.

      • themurphy@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        This solution makes sense. They need to phase out the existing rules properly, no matter how wrong they were to begin with.

        Tax them from 10% til 100% over 5 years, and let them sell off as they go through that time spand maybe?

  • suitmangray@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    This won’t do anything people who read actual news know the private equity is a convenient boogeyman hiding the refusal of state government to do their job an remove local control and mandate zoning reform and more housing of all types and sizes. Also it’s 2026 and people are still posting tv news outlets to the internet.

    • tmyakal@infosec.pub
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      3 hours ago

      Private Equity’s housing stock is actually pretty small when compared against so-called “Mom and Pop” landlords. This law creates exceptions for Mom-and-Pops that own ten properties or less.

      PE accounts for an average of 2.4% of home ownership in the US. Mom-and-Pops take up another 6.5%, nearly 3x as much. This law will have an outsized impact on sunbelt cities where PE owns double-digits portions of the market, but most of the country won’t perceive these changes at all.

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s a great way to get younger people to stop caring when they can’t actually afford to own anything. This is a step in the correct direction, corporate gatekeeping needs to end, we need to give people opportunities to own. If someone rents, borrows, and leases their entire life, why would they care if it all goes to shit?

    • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com
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      19 hours ago

      And let’s not forget: the younger people of today are the older people of tomorrow. Except for those who are handed things due to generational wealth, we’re looking at an extremely large contingent of the country (world?) which will own nothing. Perhaps the largest ever such contingent. Does not seem like a sustainable situation over any extended term.

  • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    If Trump didn’t veto it, there must be some loopholes large enough to drive a battleship through…

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Senate vote was 85-5

      Ron Johnson of Wisconsin Mike Lee of Utah Rand Paul of Kentucky Rick Scott of Florida Tommy Tuberville of Alabama

      Guessing Trump knew it would be a losing battle to veto it. Also, it should make him look better with him having to do nothing but stay out of the way

        • RBWells@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          Fuck Rick Scott to hell and back. He is in it for the $$$ and nothing else, does not give even one fuck about the people of Florida. I cannot imagine voting for him, such a high level scammer.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Damn, fuck Russian Ron Johnson. The democrats really left Barnes out to dry against Ron Johnson and he ran an awful campaign. It still blows my mind that the same election elected Democrat Evers for governor and Ron Johnson. What a wild split ticket.

      • GiantChickDicks@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        It sure would be cool if Ron Johnson would go grab a drink with Lady G and Mitchy boy. I truly hate that man.

      • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        it was also an opportunity for everyone to kumbayah and get some good press on addressing affordability

  • leadore@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Finally! I’ve watched these fucking companies buy up every house in my neighborhood that came up for sale. IMO when this trend started was when the people’s dream of ever owning a home got destroyed. Warnock for President?

    • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      We’ve had low interest rates propping up the stock market and speculative bubbles for far too long. This is why there has been too much cheap capital chasing returns over the last decade.

      It’s a bubble of its own which we are starting to see pop in a number of sectors. (Private Equity firms and banks starting to show signs of strain, zombie businesses going under, AI bubble running out of capital sources and now tapping retail investors, crypto crash, etc.)

      However this president is intent on getting us to 0% interest rates which will reverse that progress. Once the asset class can tap into essentially free money all of this progress will be undone.

      If PE can get free capital every 7 years and sit on an appreciating asset while making renters pay for it, they will. If PE has to refinance that asset every 7 years at 7% or 8% interest suddenly the math doesn’t work especially in a slumping housing market.

  • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    24 hours ago

    Can we apply that to farms too? If you aren’t actually farming, whether you have a corporation or not, you can’t buy farmland. Sorry, JD.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Now pair with legislation that says all existing corporate owned properties are taxed at 100% of any revenue derived from ownership of those properties

      • Paranomaly@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        I get where you’re coming from and an for the sentiment, but that will need at least some sort of caveat or having to sell the house of a lost family member will be become very dangerous.

        • Snapz@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          “Corporate owned” would be defined in a way that allowed for earnest actual single human/family scenarios, but also stopped little mini tyrants from trying to become a local menace through loopholes.

  • minorkeys@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Are private equity firms, as defined in the bill, actually buying homes? Or is the private entity type doing that, not classified as an equity firm?

    Rich people have nothing to do with their stolen money but buy up assets. It’s a runaway disaster for everyone. The rich are pricing people out of being alive and we act like we can’t do anything about it. At some point, perhaps gen Alpha, will have to do something about it or simply die.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      In Canada, these houses are all being bought by Mom and pop Boomer investors, leveraging equity of houses they paid 12 acorns for.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    That’s genuinely fantastic news.

    The skeptic, pessimistic part of me now wants to know how BlackRock et al will get around this with creative corporate and financial shell games, because I’m absolutely sure they will try to do just that.

    • Legonatic@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      An important distinction here is that BlackRock is not a PE firm. They are an asset management company. Now, that’s not to say they’re not in the business of buying up homes, just that they’re not PE. Blackstone is the PE firm which has been buying up single family homes. They’re different companies. Both evil though.

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Blackrock splits into redrock, orangerock, yellowrock, etc.

      All owned by rainbowrock (a blackrock® company).

      Because it’s not a ban on private equity purchasing homes, it’s a limit of 350 going forward. Because as if that limit isn’t absurdly high (it should be more like 3) it’s also unlikely to hold up in court. They should have levied increasing taxes.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Frankly the limit should be 0 for private equity. The only exception should be for mortgage lenders (for obvious reasons) who should also not be ownable by PE or VC.

        It should not be legal for corporations to own a residential property outside of the context of a mortgage. Any corporation (here, including banks) owning a residence for the purpose of rental income should be flat out illegal as well.

        • bizarroland@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          If it were me, I would have just passed a federal tax on property where whatever the local city, state, and county taxes are, there’s also a federal levy of property taxes of the exact same amount multiplied by the number of properties each taxpaying owner owns - 1.

          So if you own one home, you pay no additional taxes.

          If you and your spouse own two homes, you pay no additional taxes.

          But if you own five 1 million dollar properties as a single person and the property taxes on each of those properties is $5,000, then instead of paying a total of $25,000 in property taxes as a single homeowner, you would pay

          $5,000 * 4 * 4 + $5,000, or $85,000/yr.

          That $60,000 a year difference for being a multiple homeowner would go into a fund specifically to provide grants and assistance for low-income renters and first-time homebuyers.

          This would make it so that owning multiple homes becomes a sign of affluence.

          And it would put a steep price curve on going over the limit of even moderately reasonable amounts of homes to own as a person.

          Adding one additional $1 million home with a $5,000 property tax annual on it would actually add another $45,000/yr to the taxes that you would pay compared to someone who only owns that single home, and doing it this way, make sure that the scale of increasing taxes that you would pay on home ownership would become exponentially prohibitive.

          It would also ensure that at a very reasonable point, no matter how much you charged for rent, for any property you own, once you own more than four, it becomes impossible to actually profit off of multiple home ownership, because very quickly, no renter in the universe would pay what you need to earn in order to cover the taxes off of owning that property.

          This is part of my pitch to become president in 2032 when I become eligible.

          • bizarroland@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Oh, slight correction. Add the original taxes to the numbers I generated because the federal taxes are separate from the city, state, and local taxes.

            So in the first example, $85,000 plus $25,000 equals $110,000 a year to own five $1 million properties at $5,000 a year property taxes.

            And in the second example, $130,000 plus $30,000 equals $160,000 a year to own the sixth one.

          • Zannsolo@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            A starter home where I live is almost 1 mil. The prices would go down if any real legislation passed but a 1 mil home isn’t the end all be all.

        • frongt@lemmy.zip
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          2 days ago

          How do you differentiate between private equity and regular corporate ownership though? Because building and operating apartment buildings takes a lot more money than the average individual has.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            Yeah, so to me, that sounds like a great argument for public funding of housing.

            We don’t have to make them like old Soviet-bloc mega apartment complexes (I admit I am fond of some of the exterior aesthetics and building arrangements the Soviets tended to do, but the insides were more or less concrete shoeboxes (“to each according to their needs”, ostensibly, but imo in practice it was often far too minimal, and often not even truly meeting a given family’s needs)).

            And we don’t need and shouldn’t expect them to be massive profit generators (much like we don’t need and shouldn’t expect mass transit to be a massive profit generator). We could build quite comfortable public housing, pair it with substantially improved public physical and mental healthcare, and not only effectively solve homelessness overnight, but simultaneously make a long-term investment in the viability of American society (including but not limited to birth rates, happiness indices, GDP (more people doing well = more people able to contribute to the pool = gdp go up), education, residential ownership, diminishing crime… we can go on).

            Oops, I slipped into “we should be more socialist” mode lol

            • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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              2 days ago

              Oops, I slipped into “we should be more socialist” mode lol

              I dunno this plan sounds like it opens up a whole lot more Individual Freedoms ©️™️ 🦅 🇺🇸 for more individual people!. . . As a group demographic comprised of individuals, of course. 😉

              (Y’know, for your upcoming campaign. Rooting for you!)

      • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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        1 day ago

        The law actually does prevent shell games as written, but they can still buy larger homes and complexes and up to 350 at that.

        Perhaps now we will see those Scifi Megastructures that eventually fall into anarchy and become ungovernable black markets lmao.

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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      1 day ago

      It’s actually not bad, prevents shell games, but still allows them to keep properties they already own and allows up to 350 new properties larger than single family.

      A potential hack would be offering loans to businesses to buy 350, and if theyvreally want to push the limits they can try to buy the smaller companies which just so happens to transfer their properties.

    • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      If there is no enforcement then why bother to write laws down?

      I see an awful lot of non-enforcement of laws that are already on the books.

    • greenskye@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Apparently PE was already getting out of the market? A how money works video said that they represented ~25% of recent home sales despite having ~7% of homes.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        23 hours ago

        They’re not going to explain that right away. They wouldn’t want the poors to take adavantage of it.

      • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        Maybe there is a housing crash coming and the will of the people no longer conflicts with special interest groups.

        If they don’t plan to buy anyway, they will throw a bine so the public can make bad investments at will.

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        2 days ago

        Probably simply that affiliated companies don’t count towards that total number. So they can make an infinite number of subsidiaries as long as they’re individually under 350 properties each.

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    2 days ago

    I’ve become so jaded that I’m sitting here thinking, “if this was actually going to work the private equity firms would’ve never let it pass.

    • CannedYeet@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      They realize the market is at peak so they’re going to get out anyway.

      Or, better theory, they’ve grandfathered in existing arrangements so it’s just keeping out additional PE firms.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      My first thought was “what is a private equity firm” really and does the law have provisions for firms that are owned by private equity.

      If some numbered corporation in Delaware owns a house and private equity owns a controlling stake in that firm can it still own housing.

      What I’m asking is what is the blood quantum of a cooperation.