Zillow Back on Front Burner, Black Swans and Other Things
Zillow spent last year aggressively expanding a home-flipping operation designed to make the $2 trillion U.S. Real Estate Market better for consumers, until a bad bet on home prices shut it down. To sell the thousands of homes a little known truth about the business, called "iBuying" popped up. "Institutional Buyers" were the biggest names in global finance. Bloomberg News analysts came up with more than 100,000 property records show that Zillow and the other buyers, Opendoor and Offerpad were selling thousand of homes to the new landlords on the block: KKR, Cerebus, Blackstone and many other large hedge funds and institutions. Those properties were never listed. That caused the squeezing out of average buyers in the competitive housing market. Two out of 10 homes on average in the US went to iBuyers, double that in Sun Belt and Metropolitan areas and EVEN GREATER in communities of color! A diverse range of political voices from the Biden Administration to Conse