Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses

Vice.com ^ | November 28, 2022 | Nick Keppler

[Twotone]

I am standing on the stoop of an empty brick row house in Pittsburgh, looking into my phone and rotating my head from side to side. The house is in an alleyway facing the back of a church. The mailbox is stuffed with rain-soaked junk mail. 

The rental company’s website finishes scanning my face and an algorithm decides that I do resemble the photo on the passport I uploaded earlier. I get a text with a temporary six-digit key code. There is no one waiting to greet me as I enter.

Inside, there’s a living room painted crisp white, a kitchen with new-looking fixtures and two plain bedrooms upstairs. There is also a tiny backyard with, for some reason, just two-thirds of a fence. Also strange: The only bathroom is in the unfinished basement. My guess is some house-flipper sacrificed the one upstairs to construct a second bedroom.

This house—840 square feet, a century old, imperfect but livable—could make for a good “starter home” for someone with a few grand for a down payment and the ability to make monthly mortgage payments, which would almost certainly be less than the average rent in this neighborhood. Instead, it was purchased by Imagine Homes Management, which has been gobbling up houses in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and a few other post-industrial metro areas where there still are plenty of cheap single-family homes. 

As soon as I leave, I get an automated text asking if I want to apply to rent the place at $1,590 a month. Just like the viewing, I could go through every other step—applying, paying a deposit, moving in and even living there a few years—without speaking to human being. No one would give me a key, just a passcode. This has been the experience of some actual Imagine Home tenants.

[unclebankster]

I said I would take $30 MILLION CASH-—NO LESS....

Small pause-—hang up.

I keep getting written notes in the mail from OUT of State.

************”

Great answer👍

I own a residential property and an industrial building.
When foreign retards contact me, I’m much meaner than you are.

I’m done with over valued real estate for awhile, and only concentrating on my manufacturing business over the next couple of years.(Plus my wife & young son require a lot of attention)