The Rise of the New Land Lords (5,500 words)
Source: East Bay Express
After gobbling up foreclosed homes in Oakland and other communities, wealthy corporate investors are now creating what Wall Street calls the "rentership society."
By Darwin BondGraham
... There are landlords, and then there are land lords. The obscure company that bought Cheri King's house and evicted her, Colfin AI CA 5 LLC, is a tiny part of a global real estate empire called Colony Capital. Colony is headquartered in Santa Monica, but has offices in China, France, Italy, Lebanon, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere. Colony Capital's holdings include $50 billion in property scattered around the world.
The company's newest colony is Oakland, where, through several shadowy limited liability companies, it has bought up at least 26 single-family homes, mostly in 2012 and 2013, including Cheri King's, according to records in the Alameda County Assessor's Office.
... The deep pockets behind Colony Capital belong to Thomas J. Barrack, Jr., whose personal net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $1 billion. Barrack owns a 1,200-acre mountain ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara and circles the planet in his private jet to seal real estate deals with Saudi princes and Japanese tycoons. He owns casinos in Las Vegas, Switzerland, and Egypt, and hotels in the French Alps and Dubai. Now, he and his business partners own Cheri King's house, and they plan to squeeze profit from it.
... The rise of these new corporate housing investors, focused on a market of single-family home rentals, has been so sudden and unprecedented that the national business press has dedicated significant resources to cover this trend. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, and others have written extensively about the growth of this now multibillion-dollar industry, which feeds off the pipeline of foreclosures and the growing ranks of people who can't afford to buy a home anymore.
Read more: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-rise-of-the-new-land-lords/Content?oid=3836329&showFullText=true
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