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A landmark study from Georgia Tech found that the rise in investor activity caused a 1.4 percentage point drop in homeownership rates in metro Atlanta from 2007 to 2016. That translates to 16,500 fewer households owning homes than would be expected, were it not for the influx of Wall Street cash.
African Americans like Lowman have been hit the hardest. Investor purchases explain a 4.2 percentage point drop in Black homeownership during that period, the research found.
Large investor purchases have accelerated since then. During one 12-month stretch beginning in July 2021, investors bought one out of every three homes for sale in metro Atlanta.

 
Investors bought one of every three homes for sale here from July 2021 to June 2022 — the most in the country, according to real estate data firm Redfin. The largest firms bought more than twice as many homes in Atlanta as any other market in 2019 and 2020, according to the Congressional study.
Investment firms don’t just own a higher share of rental houses here than the 2% national figure would suggest — they own 5.6% of all single-family houses across metro Atlanta. At the neighborhood-level, the corporate market share is even larger. The AJC’s analysis found that large companies own at least 20% of the homes in nine metro Atlanta census tracts.

 
Meanwhile, state laws make it easy for corporate landlords to maximize profits, shirk their maintenance responsibilities and evict tenants when they refuse to pay for an uninhabitable home, the AJC found. Studies show the largest single-family landlords take full advantage, raising rents and fees faster — and evicting tenants more frequently — than small and mid-sized landlords.
Understaffed and overwhelmed, local governments have failed to use the few tools they have to hold landlords accountable.
The consequences are strewn across the Atlanta suburbs.