Three corporate landlords control nearly 11 percent of the single-family homes available for rent in metro Atlanta’s core counties, according to a new analysis led by Taylor Shelton, a geographer at Georgia State University.
Shelton, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State, along with his collaborator Eric Seymour of Rutgers University, investigated the ownership of rental homes in metro Atlanta and found that more than 19,000 were owned by just three companies — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings. The findings were published recently in the article “Horizontal Holdings: Untangling the Networks of Corporate Landlords” in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the discipline’s flagship journal.
“These companies own tens of thousands of properties in a relatively select set of neighborhoods, which allows them to exercise really significant market power over tenants and renters because they have such a large concentration of holdings in those neighborhoods,” Shelton said.
Metro Atlanta is facing an affordable housing crisis, and corporate landlords may be one of the reasons for that, according to a book by fellow GSU researcher Dan Immergluck. Beginning with the 2007 foreclosure crisis and continuing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many local landlords and homeowners were forced or decided to sell their properties, enabling companies that purchase buildings and rent them out for a profit, called corporate landlords, to snap up large numbers of homes.
In this new landscape, figuring out exactly who owns each property can be incredibly complicated.
Many large companies in the United States operate through smaller companies called limited liability companies, or LLCs for short. In the case of corporate landlord companies, these LLCs help protect the larger parent companies from liability or legal action that tenants might take.
“If a tenant is able to sue an LLC and win…
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