UNC Charlotte's Urban Institute has been digging into the growing role of corporate landlords in Mecklenburg County.
Senior research associate Eric Moore found that companies owning 15 or more homes have expanded their share of single-family housing here by nearly 70% since 2019, with some neighborhoods now seeing more than 1 in 5 homes owned by a corporate investor. It is the latest finding in his three-part series.
Moore joined WFAE's Nick de la Canal to talk about what that means for renters, buyers and the city's housing market.
Nick de la Canal: How exactly do you define a corporate landlord and can you give us a few examples?
Eric Moore: So, corporate landlord is actually a really complicated term. We tend to throw it around, but a corporate landlord, at least from a local level, is an entity that owns at least 15 properties.
De la Canal: And what are some of these companies? Can you give some examples?
Moore: So, the one that I think most people will recognize is American Homes for Rent. Part of the reason that we actually started this study is that they will often have different names. They might have an organization labeled as "AM415-05 Incorporated." It's still American Homes for Rent, but it doesn't look like that.
So we wanted to try to disentangle that and understand a little more thoroughly what the corporate landlord landscape looked like.
De la Canal: So how much have these landlords' holdings grown in Mecklenburg County, and where are we seeing the highest concentration?
Moore: In terms of growth ... using the most recently available tax data — so from 2023 — we see that corporate landlords own just under 7.5% of all single-family homes. While that number may seem pretty small, that comes out to just around 20,000.
As to the concentration, we actually did something called a hotspot analysis, and it tends to be around northwest Charlotte.
De la Canal: Yeah, you mentioned some neighborhoods like Steel Creek, University City, Oakdale and some neighborhoods in Huntersville. What does it mean for the people who live there or people trying to buy into those communities?
Moore: That's sort of the outstanding question, because there has been some research done, particularly since 2015, on the "impact of corporate landlords," but the issue I have is that we've never really had a consistent definition, so you can't really say what the impact is. And so this is really our first step into asking those larger questions.
De la Canal: That kind of leads into what I wanted to ask next, which is that a lot of people are opposed to the idea of Wall Street buying up the neighborhood on instinctive grounds. But can we say whether these companies have a negative impact on neighborhoods? Is there evidence either way? Maybe we don't really know.
Moore: I would argue that we don't quite know. Again, there have been some great studies coming out of Atlanta, Boston, California, even Texas, where we are starting to look at this. But once again, unless you have this accepted understanding of who corporate landlords are and what they're owning, we can't really make that conclusion, at least from a scientific perspective.
De la Canal: So, given that corporate landlords still own less than 8% of homes in Mecklenburg County, why should the average Charlottean care about this trend?
Moore: They should care because it's commonly being discussed at the policy level. But from a more personal perspective, if you are looking for a home right now, having and trying to compete with a corporate landlord who has greater access to funds, who has the ability to maybe pay for an entire house in cash, that puts you at a significant disadvantage.
De la Canal: So, based on your research, what is the next big question that we should be asking about corporate landlords in Charlotte?
Moore: Honestly, it gets back to what we were discussing earlier: Do they have an impact on, let's say, neighborhood quality or neighborhood stability? Are they upkeeping these properties? I think we can finally, honestly and more accurately start addressing these questions.
