Home-Buying Companies Stuck With Hundreds of Houses as Demand Slows
As mortgage rates surged, some customers backed out of purchases or needed more time for financing
3 min
Ribbon Home Inc. had a fast-growing business during the housing boom. The New York City-based startup purchased homes with cash on behalf of buyers. Then it sold the homes to the buyers at the same price, plus a fee, once the buyers got a mortgage.
This approach made their clients’ offers more appealing, since sellers often prefer all-cash transactions that can close quickly and are considered more reliable. Ribbon has been active in hot markets such as Atlanta and Charlotte.
But last year as mortgage rates surged, some Ribbon customers backed out of their purchases or needed more time to get financing. That left the company owning nearly 400 homes, according to property records analysed by research firm Attom Data Solutions and confirmed by the company.
Ribbon is one of a handful of young companies known as power buyers. These firms created a niche business around helping home buyers gain an edge during the hyper competitive housing boom. Now that the market has cooled, some of these companies are stuck with hundreds of homes they acquired on behalf of clients.
Orchard Technologies Inc., another power buyer that has been active in places such as Denver and Dallas, helps customers buy a new home and move before selling their previous home. If clients can’t sell their homes after four months, Orchard agrees to buy them.
The company now owns about 200 homes its customers were unable to sell, said its Chief Executive Court Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham said Orchard has had to buy homes from customers three times as frequently over the past six months.
The unanticipated glut of homes these firms are carrying is an example of how housing-oriented companies that thrived when mortgage rates were super low are struggling to survive in a higher rate environment.
Online home-flipping companies also experienced turbulence as rates surged. Opendoor Technologies Inc. last year slashed prices on thousands of homes it purchased near the height of the market. The company reported huge losses and laid off 18% of its workforce.
Ribbon has let go of about 170 employees, or 85% of its staff, but it still needs to unload its surplus of houses. About half of those homes Ribbon will try to sell on the open market because their customers didn’t follow through on their purchases. People backed out because they didn’t want to sell their current homes in a down market, had credit issues or had a life event that changed their plans, said Shaival Shah, Ribbon’s chief executive.
The other half the company hopes to sell to the original customers. Most of those customers are renting from Ribbon, and some have asked for more time to obtain financing, Mr. Shah said.
Some power buyers say they are optimistic the housing market can stabilise, and recently there have been a few signs that buying may be picking up.
Power buyers say that their business will continue to serve home buyers in competitive markets and help even the playing field with investors, who often purchase homes with cash. Meanwhile, many are focused on improving products aimed at prospective sellers who are nervous to list their homes in a slow market.
“There was sort of a power shift, from the power sitting with the seller knowing that their home is going to sell within a day, to the power sitting with the buyer,” said Tim Heyl, founder of the Austin-based power buyer Homeward Inc.
Ribbon, which halted its cash-buyer program last year, said it is developing new products before it restarts. HomeLight Inc., another power buyer, recently changed up one of its main offerings so that it wouldn’t buy as many homes moving forward, said Drew Uher, the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Cunningham, of Orchard, said his company has reduced losses from homes it acquired by charging customers fees on both the sale of their previous homes and the purchase of their new homes. He said seller demand for backup offers from Orchard is rising given ongoing uncertainty about home sales.
Some executives said they don’t expect every power buyer to survive. Many relied on venture capital to grow during the height of the housing market, but they are unlikely to raise as much money now. Between January and late November 2022, venture investment in proptech companies decreased 21% compared with the same period the year prior, according to a report from Keefe, Bruyette and Woods Inc.
“People were doing all sorts of things to outbid or be the most competitive offer,” said Diane Vanna, a real-estate agent at Baird & Warner in Chicago, who in 2021 represented a buyer who won a bidding war against 36 other offers. “Now it’s really levelled off.”
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
3 min
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
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