Stephen Billings

Stephen Billings appears in Two indicators for lowering the rent as the housing researcher explaining how corporate single-family rentals grew after the 2008 foreclosure wave. He says investors discovered that holding foreclosed homes for rental cash flow could be more attractive than flipping them.

His role is to keep the corporate-landlord story quantitative and mixed. The episode uses him for the claim that institutional buyers can raise prices a little in high-presence markets, that their national purchase share is very small, that Build-To-Rent Housing may add supply, and that his research also finds higher crime in neighborhoods with more corporate-landlord purchases.

Connections

• Institutional Single-Family Rental - main market pattern he explains.
• Corporate Landlord Tradeoffs - mixed outcome frame grounded partly by his research.
• Build-To-Rent Housing - housing form he generally supports in the episode.
• Neighborhood Opportunity Access - opportunity and neighborhood-effects tradeoff connected to his findings.