Live on Bloomberg TV

00:00This was such a fascinating story because it took place in Phoenix, which was felt like kind of a ground zero for the housing bust back in 2008, except this time around when the housing market started deflating. It's the little guys who came out ahead. Yeah, that's the bit the latest twist. All right. So like I I wrote about the crash. Way back when? Well, ten years ago. And I was in Phoenix then. And, you know, you had investors, private equity firms buying up houses at the courthouse steps, you know, for pennies on the dollar. And now it's it's the little guys who are just taking advantage of the distress of these large institutions. So it's it's a real reversal. Well, what does this then mean when you're looking at the future of essentially the housing market for the rest of 2023? Are we in for some sort of a bubble popping for lack of a better term? Well, I would say that, you know, this is a one of the markets where you had just a ton of investors of all kinds. But also, you know, the heaviest presence is so-called eye buyers, which I could explain please and institute an OK and single family landlord. So I buyers these are, you know, companies. Well, the biggest company here is open door. The idea is they they kind of take some of the pain of the process for sellers. They'll they'll buy the property from the seller for a retail for the retail price. And then, you know, no paperwork or limited paperwork. And then they turn around and they resell it. So they act like a flipper. But in a way that kind of also like a market maker. The trouble here is that the they kind of got caught because they were accelerating purchases right before home prices started to fall. So they got caught with a lot of overpriced properties that they had. And now they've had to like slash prices to get home sold. So they they were in it until the very end and they got caught flat footed when the market turned on them. What about these small investors, these individual homebuyers who are coming in? What do they have at their advantage? Because borrowing costs for them have also gone up as well. Yeah, I mean, they're are big advantages, they bought low in many and most cases, right. So they looked for homes. They'd sort of did what traditional flippers do, which is they make money on the buy, they make sure they pay a low price for whatever they purchase. And that's for the most part what they were doing. And so when the when the housing market turned, it wasn't great for them. But they you know, they had enough of a margin that they a lot of them walked away relatively unscathed. They had you know, they put a lot more maybe into renovations, but they also were buying at a lower price. And, you know, and still selling for more than what they purchased for.

No schedule data available.

Wall Street I-Buyers Are Losing to the Little Guy

Bloomberg's Prashant Gopal explains how every day homebuyers are outsmarting the pros and Wall Street in this "Bloomberg Big Take." (Source: Bloomberg)