Following the collapse of the housing market in the Great Recession, a small contingent of hedge funds and private equity firms bought up scores of single-family homes as part of a new real estate investment strategy.
Instead of flipping these properties, investors held onto them, making money from rental payments and fees and growing equity as the value of the properties recovered. They also created rental-backed securities, a new financial instrument that sold bond holders the promise of future rental income.
Below, you'll find links to our reporting and resources and data that powered the investigation.
NOTE: If you're a journalist or researcher interested in investigating corporate ownership your local single-family home market, check out our toolkit for code and tutorials to replicate our work in your community. And if you use our work, please reach out to let us know!
Read our three-day series beginning May 1, 2022, into how the growth of the single-family rental industry is affecting tenants, neighborhoods and communities in Security for Sale in one of our three partner publications:
Main stories
- Security for Sale, Part 1: With piles of cash, big investors become NC’s top rental-home landlords
May 1, 2022 // Tyler Dukes, Payton Guion & Gordon Rago - Security for Sale, Part 2: Wall Street landlords are finely tuned to make profits. That can squeeze tenants.
May 2, 2022 // Payton Guion, Tyler Dukes & Gordon Rago - Security for Sale, Part 3: As corporate landlords rise in Charlotte, officials are watching, not acting — for now.
May 3, 2022 //Payton Guion, Tyler Dukes & Gordon Rago
Sidebars
- Methodology: How we made the best count of NC corporate-owned rental homes
May 1, 2022 // Tyler Dukes - After foreclosures, NC neighborhood is transformed again, by corporate landlords
May 1, 2022 // Payton Guion & Gordon Rago - Here are some important things to know about your tenant rights in North Carolina
May 2, 2022 // Gordon Rago - HOAs limit corporate landlords in Charlotte. What about neighborhoods without them?
May 3, 2022 // Payton Guion - How to tell if a corporate investor owns the North Carolina rental house you like
May 1, 2022 // Gordon Rago - We had a lot of questions for corporate landlords. Here’s what they had to say.
May 3, 2022 // Payton Guion & Tyler Dukes - Why is a Japanese conglomerate buying up Raleigh-area homes to rent them out?
May 2, 2022 // Mary Helen Moore - 5 things we learned investigating the rise of corporate landlords in North Carolina
May 4, 2022 // Tyler Dukes & Payton Guion
Multimedia
- Map: Are companies buying up your neighborhood’s houses? Search your zip code to find out.
May 4, 2022 // David Newcomb & Tyler Dukes - Graphic: Watch a decade of corporate landlord growth in NC
May 1, 2022 // David Newcomb & Tyler Dukes - Video: Rasheedah Harrison continues to battle with Progress Residential after moving out
May 3, 2022 // Alex Slitz - Video: Action NC canvasses Charlotte neighborhood
May 3, 2022 // Melissa Rodriguez - Video: Charlotte realtor talks about institutional investment properties
May 1, 2022 // Khadejeh Nikouyeh
Follow-ups
- Bill would limit corporate landlord homes in Charlotte, the Triangle and more of NC
Feb. 23, 2023 // Tyler Dukes - Watchdog group asks NC treasurer to help curb corporate landlord ‘abuse’
Nov. 29, 2022 // Tyler Dukes & Payton Guion - Mecklenburg officials push for federal review of corporate landlords’ impact
Aug. 22, 2022 // Payton Guion - Corporate landlords used ‘abusive tactics’ to evict tenants despite pandemic eviction ban
Aug. 1, 2022 // Payton Guion & Tyler Dukes - Investors grab homes with cash offers. Charlotte buyers can do the same — for a price.
July 15, 2022 // Payton Guion - Corporate landlords use exclusionary language in rental listings, UNCC study finds
July 11, 2022 // Payton Guion - Mecklenburg County may spend $500K to address impacts from corporate landlords
May 23, 2022 // Payton Guion - Biden housing plan includes first attempts to slow corporate landlords active in NC
May 19, 2022 // Payton Guion & Tyler Dukes - NC congresswoman seeks solutions on corporate landlords after Observer, N&O investigation
May 12, 2022 // Payton Guion - Hear from the journalists who reported on big investors buying up 40,000 NC homes
May 11, 2022 // Staff - Raleigh city leader wants investor home data, praises N&O series
May 4, 2022 // Anna Johnson
Tracking the single-family rental companies and their purchases is tricky.
Although there are just a handful of national corporations buying on a large scale in Charlotte and Triangle, they use a myriad of subsidiaries and holding companies to conduct their business. There's also variation – misspellings, mixed punctuation and the like – in how these subsidiaries are recorded in property records managed by each of the state's 100 counties.
"This has been such an opaque issue for decades now that we have really, really bad data flowing around in the public sphere about how active these types of investment funds are," David Szakonyi, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University and co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.
So in the winter of 2021, reporters at The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer set about creating the most authoritative dataset possible of investment buyers across the state – particularly the single-family homes that have long been key to middle-class American wealth.
Reporters first manually scoured property records in Wake and Mecklenburg counties to create a database of parent companies and their most common subsidiaries, which can often be linked by naming convention, corporate mailing address and company officials. They used that list to create a machine learning model to find other name variations.
Data from other researchers examining the growth of the single-family rental industry, including the UNC-Charlotte Urban Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Maya Abood, was used to add more names. North Carolina court data on eviction proceedings, state utility data and corporate registration data from the nonprofit OpenCorporates helped, too. The Anti-Corruption Data Collective supplied additional property transaction data through a research agreement with the real estate tech firm Zillow.
Almost all subsidiaries identified by the N&O and Observer's reporting were matched – either with statistical software or manually – to corporate registrations filed with the N.C. Secretary of State's Office to verify connections with their parent companies.
The list of investor subsidiaries was then matched using statistical software with property owner names recorded by the North Carolina OneMap, a state project through the N.C. Geographic Information Coordinating Council to collect and publish property parcel information from all 100 counties.
Properties were removed from the count if their zoning, land use or building description did not align with the U.S. Census Bureau definition of a single-family home. Companies with fewer than 100 properties in their portfolios were not included in the analysis.
The OneMap data was last accessed on April 20, although the property records may lag by several months depending on the county.
The reporting identified nearly 40,000 individual properties owned by subsidiaries of about 20 parent companies.
| Company name |
|---|
| AMERICAN HOMES 4 RENT |
| INVITATION HOMES |
| PROGRESS RESIDENTIAL |
| AMHERST RESIDENTIAL (MAIN STREET RENEWAL) |
| FIRSTKEY |
| TRICON RESIDENTIAL |
| RS RENTAL |
| FRONT YARD RESIDENTIAL / PROGRESS RESIDENTIAL |
| MY COMMUNITY HOMES |
| AALTO INVEST UK |
| HOME PARTNERS OF AMERICA |
| STARWOOD PROPERTY TRUST |
| YAMASA (PROGRESS RESIDENTIAL) |
| BROOKFIELD ASSET MANAGEMENT (CONREX) |
| VINEBROOK HOMES |
| SYLVAN ROAD CAPITAL |
| HUDSON CAPITAL PROPERTIES |
| WALTON STREET CAPITAL (BRIDGE TOWER) |
| NEW RESIDENTIAL INVESTMENT |
| SPARROW |
| SFR3 FUND |
| KAIROS LIVING |
| Note: Names in parenthesis are property managers, rather than owners. The major investors behind Progress announced the acquisition of Front Yard Residential in 2020, often making the ownership structure of properties at one point associated with Front Yard unclear. |
Szakonyi, who reviewed the N&O and Observer’s analysis, called the analysis the "best exercise I've ever seen trying to identify properties owned by large institutional investments."
The N&O and the Observer are making both the investor subsidiary list and the database of corporate investor-owned properties available publicly for all uses.
The Pulitzer Center contributed to this project by awarding The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer a machine learning grant.
This repo will be updated periodically with new data and resources. We'll note any signficant changes below.
May 4, 2022: Added in site addresses for ~3,200 Cabarrus County properties missing from NC OneMap data, sourced directly from Cabarrus County.
April 30, 2022: Initial data upload
The following files can be downloaded from the data directory in this repo. File names are appended with a timestamp indicating when they were generated, in the format YYYYMMDDHHMM.
Use of this data is granted to researchers, policymakers and the public under an MIT License.
Please cite/credit/attribute all uses to: The News & Observer/The Charlotte Observer or an analysis by The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer. And if our data makes it into your work, let us know!
To download:
- Clone our repository
- Download the entire directory as a zip file
- Download individual files by right-clicking on the
RaworDownloadbutton and clicking "Save as..."
Have questions? Spot an error in our data? Contact Tyler Dukes at mtdukes@newsobserver.com.
A comma-separated value file containing the lookup table that ties subsidiaries (the buying entities listed on property records) with the associated parent company, based on property mailing address, corporate registration records and other sources. Wherever possible, this table also includes North Carolina corporate registration information. Subsidiaries are excluded from this list of their parent companies own fewer than 100 properties across the state.
A comma-separated value file containing selected data from the NC OneMap parcel file, joined against the corporate subsidiary lookup table to identify properties owned by large corporate landlords. Properties were excluded from this file if they're land and building use codes did not meet the U.S. Census Bureau definition of single-family properties (i.e. multi-family dwellings or commercial properties).
| field | description |
|---|---|
| owner | owner name obtained from property records |
| investor_label_lvl1 | first-level label to denote whether the owner is a corporate landlord/institutional investor |
| investor_label_lvl2 | second-level label to specify the parent company tied to the property owner |
| sos_name | standardized subsidiary name matched to the N.C. Secretary of State's corporation registration database |
| sos_id | ID number provided by the corporation registration database |
| registry_url | direct link to the subsidiary's corporation registration page |
Many of the fields here are drawn directly from the N.C. OneMap parcel file. For more on the field layout of that file, consult its own data dictionary.
| field | description |
|---|---|
| sf_id | unique ID generated by the N&O/Observer reporter team after importing N.C. OneMap data |
| parcel_identification1 | local (county) parcel number for the parcel record Provided by N.C. OneMap as PARNO |
| county | county name Provided by N.C. OneMap as CNTYNAME |
| owner_raw | primary surface owner name Provided by N.C. OneMap as OWNNAME |
| owner_clean | cleaned name of owner, removing extraneous spaces, all punctuation and common misspellings |
| sos_name | standardized subsidiary name matched to the N.C. Secretary of State's corporation registration database |
| investor_label_lvl2 | second-level label to specify the parent company tied to the property owner |
| mailing_address | generated field using the OneMap's MAILADD, MUNIT, MCITY, MSTATE and MZIP fields |
| mailing_zip | mailing zip code Provided by N.C. OneMap as MZIP |
| site_address | full site address as a single field Provided by N.C. OneMap as SITEADD |
| site_city | site address city name Provided by N.C. OneMap as SCITY |
| site_zip | zip code of the site address; If maintained and available, this supports physical address delivery and the vehicle tax system. Provided by N.C. OneMap as SZIP |
| type_use1 | local assessment parcel use description of primary land use, such as residential, agriculture, forestry, commercial, etc; in some cases where this field was null for Cabarrus, Union, Mecklenburg, Iredell and Hoke counties N&O/Observer reporters matched parcels with corresponding type/use data from each county directly to improve accuracy Provided by N.C. OneMap as PARUSEDESC |
| type_use2 | code for the primary use of structure(s) or activity on a parcel such as single-family residential, retail, manufacturing, agricultural, etc Provided by N.C. OneMap as PARUSEDSC2 |
| type_use_source | notes if the source of the type/use column was the NC OneMap or a match with original county data |
| deeded_acreage | record or recorded area as a numeric field in acres, formerly indicated as deed acres Provided by N.C. OneMap as RECAREANO |
| land_value | value of the land on the parcel in dollars Provided by N.C. OneMap as LANDVAL |
| total_value | total value of the parcel in dollars Provided by N.C. OneMap as PARVAL |
| year_built | year built of the primary building on the parcel Provided by N.C. OneMap as STRUCTYEAR |
| sale_date | date of the last sale if available, as a date field Provided by N.C. OneMap as SALEDATE |
| sos_id | ID number provided by the corporation registration database |
| registry_url | direct link to the subsidiary's corporation registration page |
| lat | latitude calculated from the centroid of the NC OneMap parcel |
| lng | longitude calculated from the centroid of the NC OneMap parcel |
Interactive motion graphics in the Security for Sale series were created by David Newcomb. Read more about how he preprocessed the data to and created the maps here.
Security for Sale was reported and written by investigative reporters Payton Guion of The Charlotte Observer and Tyler Dukes of The News & Observer, with significant contributions from Observer growth reporter Gordon Rago. Additional reporting by News & Observer real estate reporter Mary Helen Moore.
Art direction and animation by Sohail Al-Jamea | Illustrations by Rachel Handley | Design, development & interactive maps by David Newcomb
Photos, drone footage and videos by McClatchy visual journalists Jeff Siner, Khadejeh Nikouyeh, Melissa Rodriguez, Travis Long, Julia Wall, Alex Slitz, Loumay Alesali, The' Pham and Scott Sharpe.
Edited by Cathy Clabby, McClatchy Southeast investigations editor, and Adam Bell, Observer business and arts editor.
A special thanks to the Pulitzer Center, which supported this project with a machine learning grant grant.