With contributions by Brigid Cummings and Ashley Lucero
On April 13, Summit hosted a live webinar with two in-house experts discussing the increasing trend of corporations and investors purchasing single-family residential properties. Summit director Josh Goldberg and senior manager Corey West participated in a panel discussion moderated by director Kate Lynch Machado. The webinar focused on the pros and cons of investor activity and the impact on minority communities using publicly available Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. The panelists also discussed current government and homeowners’ association initiatives designed to monitor and regulate investor activity in communities to reduce the potential of crowding out single-family home buyers looking for homes to become their permanent residences.
The topic discussed covers two of Summit’s core competencies: valuation and disposition efforts, as well as fair lending in the housing market. Specifically, Summit has experience supporting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in its best execution efforts for managing its vast portfolio by providing strategic support for and building the best execution model. In the webinar, Goldberg and West explored how investor activity in the housing market may impact valuation and disposition and what opportunities policy makers may have to insert themselves.
Summit also supports enforcement agencies such as HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in examining how various activities in the home-purchasing process impact minority borrowers and their respective communities. In this webinar, we discussed how these communities are disproportionately affected by investor involvement through the increase in property values and median incomes. In addition to spotlighting two of Summit’s core competencies, the topic of fair housing is aligned with HUD’s Equity Action Plan when addressing differences in homeownership rates, especially for Black and Latino households.
Summit is committed to continuing research on the impact of investor involvement in the single-family housing market, with an emphasis on the impact of minority borrowers as a crowding effect and potential fair lending violations due to policies such as the vetting of potential home buyers by homeowners’ associations. We also anticipate this topic being a part of HUD’s Special Studies project and possibly addressed as part of a consortium similar to the PAVE initiative.
