Robot landlords

[BacktoCricaddict]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7eaw/robot-landlords-are-buying-up-houses

 

Real-estate experts ( @Under_Score ?), any thoughts on this?

 

Quote

Imagine Homes is an example of an “automated landlord,” a company that uses new data tools and technologies to minimize the costs of on-site human labor while collecting profits from rental properties. They are essential to the new and growing sector of companies backed by Wall Street investment firms that buy up thousands of single-family rental homes across several states.

 

Founded in 2016, Imagine Homes is linked to Colchis Capital Management, a deep-pocketed West Coast investment fund interested in companies that automate and simplify real estate transactions. Unlike most of the larger mass renters of single-family homes, they haven’t opened leasing offices in any of the cities where they operate—Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and St. Louis, according to The Automated Landlord, an expansive look at the role of technology in the Wall Street grab of houses, published in the February 2022 issue of the journal Environment and Planning.

The company, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, has not specified its number of employees. By most indications, it is a scrappy outfit, with 35 employees listed on LinkedIn and 50 to 200 estimated by Indeed, all to manage 1,500 houses across four states and to rapidly acquire more. It outsources and automates most of the tasks that traditional landlords do.

 

There isn’t much data of automated landlords' effect on home prices yet, Brendan McKay, president of advocacy at the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts, told Motherboard. “But it's pretty easy to draw a straight line to the fact that it is making it significantly harder for low- to moderate-income families to become homeowners, because that’s the market that they're buying. So it is absolutely disenfranchising that segment of people.”