The hot, hot housing market in the Phoenix-metro last year was a seller’s paradise, but misery for buyers. Experts studying the market put it simply: there were not enough homes for all the people who wanted to buy, or even rent, in the Valley in 2021.
While the majority of predictions showed the pricing increases may slow in 2022, the latest market analysts still suggest, housing prices will continue to rise.
12 News analyzed one year of home-sales data to find out how many buyers are coming from out-of-state, how many investment buyers are purchasing homes, and who was the single largest buyer of homes in Maricopa County.
Progress Residential was the single largest purchaser of residential properties during that time frame in Maricopa County.1
Progress Residential was incorporated in Arizona in June of 2019, according to data from the Secretary of State’s website. Since then, Progress has purchased nearly 1,500 homes in Maricopa County.
Homes purchased by Progress Residential (June 2020-May 2021)
“What these investors are doing are disadvantaging the households that most need that foothold within the market,” Dr. Dierdre Pfeiffer explained, who holds a Ph.D. in urban planning and teaches housing and planning policy at ASU. “These buyers cannot compete with these large institutional investors.”2
Over the past six years, 19 of the 32 homes on Tammy Sue Lane (in suburban Nashville) have been purchased by a billion-dollar investment venture, part of an unprecedented flow of global finance into the American suburbs. Less than 10 years old, the company has amassed one of the nation’s largest portfolios of single-family houses, becoming the landlord for tens of thousands of families.
The venture, Progress Residential, acquires as many as 2,000 houses a month through the use of a computerized property-search algorithm and swift all-cash offers. Progress executives boast that the company’s efficient management practices have been a boon to their tenants who cannot afford to buy one of the “entry level” homes.
But according to previously undisclosed documents and dozens of interviews with renters and former employees, Progress Residential has been ringing up substantial profits for wealthy investors around the world while outbidding middle-class home buyers…
Behind Progress Residential is Pretium Partners, a New York-based investment firm whose business plan and investors are revealed in the Pandora Papers, a trove of offshore financial records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with The Washington Post.3
Sources:
1Valley housing prices skyrocket in 2021, will trend continue? – 12News
2Company bought up most of a Phoenix neighborhood – 12News
3Investors Profited From Rental Homes – Washington Post (subscriber content)