Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Oh yeah, I work for Westminster Baker Toe.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Welcome everybody to the House Committee on General and Housing. Today is still Thursday, March 12. We are commencing to hear H607, which is an act relating to institutional real estate investment, investors purchase of single and two family residence. I would say that also includes private equity purchase. What we're going to start, this is the first time to my knowledge this has been heard, and I mean, not just this bill, this issue. And interestingly, the whole issue of private equity in healthcare is the subject of the bill and is being discussed in this building at the same time. I don't know that we will be able to act on this bill at this time, but we wanted to commence hearings because of the importance of these. What we're going to start with is a walkthrough, which for members who are watching is where our legislative council takes us through the bill that is the subject of this. And after that, we're gonna have Catherine Nelson, who's assistant director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity, who has been investigating this issue, is going to testify to us via Zoom. So, Cameron, take it away. Yes, sir. For the record, Cameron Woodhaughs, legislative council. As mentioned, I'll walk you through page six zero seven. An act relating to institutional real estate investors purchase of single and two family residences. This bill really has two parts.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: The first dealing with the purchase of single and two family residences by these types of entities, they are defined. Second, it really first deals with the purchase of those homes and then separately it deals with the tax implications for these types of entities and what they're authorized to deduct. I'm not going to walk you through that piece, will kind of comment on it towards the second half of the bill but that you would need Kirby Keaton for to kind of walk through the specifics of how those deductions work, etcetera. But before we begin, section one is amending title 27, adding in a new section five forty seven, And I just wanted to start by looking at where that is, why are we putting in title 27, and where is it going to fit. So you have title 27 related to property. Chapter five is about conveying real estate. And then this is going to live down here in a miscellaneous chapter. Here and as you can see a lot of what's in this chapter is related to recording of titles, rules for perpetuities, rules for mortgages, etc. So it's going to fit within that framework. First I'm going talk about some definitions because it's important really to understand what entities we're talking about, is who or what is going to be impacted here. So for starters we have a definition of a covered entity. A covered entity is an institutional real estate investor or an entity that receives funding from an institutional real estate investor for the purchase of single or two family residences. So it is a business organization type, could be an individual, but it could also be a business organization. But the key thing is it has to be an institutional real estate investor. That's kind of the key words here.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Can you define that for me?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: I'm going get to the next definition shortly and it's the defined institution for real estate investment.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Let me pull it up so I can

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: get there. So one thing that's just documented here at the second half of this definition is a loan provided in exchange for a mortgage of the residence that is being purchased is not funding for the purposes of this subdivision. What does that mean? So the covered entity is an institutional real estate investor or an entity that receives funding from an institutional real estate investor. Getting a loan to purchase a house is not going to be considered funding in that determination if the mortgage is available to other individuals of the public. So this is about debt. This says it excludes debt because it's really about investors who are putting equity in. Yes. Okay, so right off the bat, what's not going to be included? What are we not going to talk about here? What's not covered under the remainder of the bill? Nonprofits, the five zero one(three) organizations, land banks, community land trusts, or a creditor or its loan servicer acquiring ownership of real property in full or partial satisfaction of a secured debt. So if you're financing an other individual and you're then having to go take ownership of that property because you have a secured debt on that property secured back by the mortgage right, you executing on that property isn't going to be covered here. In other words, if a bank forecloses, how many of available that they're not considering it. Why

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: not just call it a bank?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Because what covering here, the institutional real estate investors, I mean, theory, it could be some sort of financial institution, but it's likely not for this reason. So institutional real estate investor means entity or combined group that directly or indirectly owns 10 or more single family or two family residences, so that's the first condition, this entity has to own at least 10 dwellings. Yeah.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Maybe for you or somebody else sitting at this table, why was 10 chosen?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: I've done some research in what some other states have proposed in this space, and it kind of runs the gamut. The thresholds are different as far as many are owned before an entity comes under some type of similar type of definition. It's really a policy decision for you all. I did not choose Tim.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Did I?

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: I know if I did either.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Was many months ago, weeks ago, I don't know.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Could I ask, let me follow that up. Say I'm an individual who owns my home, but I also own nine single family residences or two family residences. Is my individual, my home, going to create a

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: 10? Potentially,

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: And I think we're getting ahead of ourselves because you also will have to meet more I think people are getting confused when they read the bill thinking it's just one of those things. So you have to meet multiple criteria. So I think we're getting ahead of this one.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: I also wanna say here, just by way of framing this, Cameron acting as a scribner here looked around at what's happening in other states. There's all kinds of open issues with respect to how we define, who we include, who we don't. Some other state, you'll see there are other things in here that may, the numbers may be much too big for Vermont. That's all lies ahead for us to decide, you know, as we go. And really, we have the discretion to sort of tailor this to us eventually.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: I'm trying to highlight for the public because there's been a lot of concern and fear that it was just that's the only criteria piece is that you owned, like people were freaking out. You have to meet multiple criterias combined.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Yes. Am I reading it incorrectly? That if I own 10 or more lines fifteen and sixteen, that makes me eligible. The combined is lines 17 through 20.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Two things. It says and. Why don't

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: you let him explain it though?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Hang on, two things. First off, be an institutional real estate investor, you have to meet three things. You have to own 10 or more homes, you have to manage or receive funds pulled from investors and act as a fiduciary with respect to them. So you are an investment entity. And you have to have $30,000,000 or more in net value assets under management. You have to meet all three of those to meet

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: You just said that question. Oh,

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: my apologies. There's three. If I said four, I'm sorry. You have to meet all three of those to be considered an institutional real estate investor. To the question directly, what if I am a member of this entity, does my single family residence count towards these number 10? And I said, it depends. And it depends because a single family residence is defined, but it excludes right there in the sub A, a single family residence that is used as the principal residence of any person who has an ownership interest in a covered entity. So in the example that you gave, let's assume you're a partner in this investment firm and you're investing and you're a fiduciary for other individuals who are giving you money to invest their assets, your single family residence that you live in isn't considered one of them. But I do think back to rep grads now as kind of point of emphasis because I've been working with I've rep gotten grads so many emails about this initially when it first The came institutional real estate investor has to meet all three of those conditions on the bottom of that page. Own 10 or more single or two family residences or both is the single or the two family residence. That's where both is. So you could own nine single family residences and one two family residence, now you meet the 10.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Gotcha, okay, thank I think that's what was throwing me off. Thank you.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: So it's you own 10 or more residences, You manage or receive funds for management. So you're investing other people's monies. And you have $30,000,000 or more in net assets. So the first thing I would point out to you is I have no idea how many of these entities exist in Vermont. And I would advise you to try to do your best to find that out. I would potentially start with the DFR or some of your financial institution representatives that come in and speak to you on a regular basis of whether or not there's a way to take these funding by this.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: But

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Go ahead.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: But yeah, so I've just gotten frustrated because which when you were doing this walkthrough, this was the piece that I wanted to highlight because I've gotten a lot of emails on this piece. So before we move forward, I'm just like, for anyone listening, this is a really important part. And as our chair mentioned, all policy decisions. This bill, I did my introduction a while ago, so I'm refreshing as we go along, was modeled after other states. So it's not reinventing the wheel, but if it doesn't work for us or the committee, these pieces are policy choices. Thank you.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Okay. Moving to page three, there is in the sub B a clarification of what it means to own a single family residence. You have to own 10 of them. And so the sub B here is saying, we're going to consider that you own a single or two family residence if you directly own it or you indirectly own 10% or more of the residents. And then we get into the definition of what is a single family residence, one dwelling, a residential property consisting of one dwelling provided that, as we mentioned, we're not going to consider someone's principal residence. And any single family residence constructed, acquired, or operated with federal, state, or local appropriated funding sources. So going back to the exclusions above, you're excluding nonprofits, excluding land trusts, you're excluding land banks. The thought here, if you're getting federal funding to subsidize the building of these entities, we're not going to consider those. Two family residents, you have the same A and B. So the only difference here is it's a residential property consisting of two dwelling units, very straightforward. Okay, now those are just the definitions. So we know what we're talking about. We're talking about covered entities. What's a covered entity? It's an institutional real estate investor. Now what are we going to regulate here? We're regulating when those entities can purchase homes. So that's what the sub B here is, there is a ninety day waiting period for those covered entities. So under the sub one, notwithstanding any other provision, a covered entity shall not purchase, acquire, or offer to purchase or acquire any interest in a single family residence or two family residence unless the residence has been listed for sale to the general public for at least ninety days. So it is not a prohibition on them purchasing property. It's saying that you must wait ninety days in order to acquire any interest in that home. And then you have a sub two which is stating that if the seller changes the asking price, the 90 days starts over. So if it comes off the market, it goes back on the market or the price drops or increases any change in the asking price from the seller, the ninety days starts over. And then the sub C is enforcement. The violation is an unfair method of competition in violation of the Consumer Protection Act. So you have deceptive acts in commerce. You also have unfair methods of competition, and this is deemed an unfair method of competition, which brings with it steeper penalties under the Consumer Protection That's the meat of the bill as it relates to the purchasing and transfer of ownership of homes. The rest of the bill, section two, so page four on, this is about bringing over and defining the same type of entities in the tax code and then impacting certain deductions that these entities can deduct for the purchase of these homes or interest gained from the purchase of those homes from their taxes. And again, I would have to defer to Kirby on how that works. Have any specific questions in that space. My understanding is we're depriving the tax benefits, essentially don't have depreciation, you don't have depreciation, etcetera. That that's how I would best way to phrase it simply is you're you're taking away some some, you know, tax benefits for these types of entities.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Can that be can that just be for Vermont? Yeah. But not for investors from outside of state? Is this so are we talking I'm picturing two different scenarios. Is entities that are based in Vermont buying property somewhere else or entities from somewhere else buying property in Vermont?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: So it's only going to affect entities that are subject to Vermont. So an entity that doesn't own any property in Vermont isn't going to be impacted, But if they then come in and buy so let's say an entity buys one single residence here in Vermont, but they own 20 residences in New Hampshire and New York, the statute is silent. And I imagine the implications of it are going to be no. We're not going to examine what you've done. Would only apply to the activity that you've done here in Vermont. But you could if that's a policy decision for you all, you could alter that to say owning family or homes in your family. That's a good question. The whole issue of both ways of purchase of out of state property by Vermont entities and purchase by out of state entities is something that Essex you dealt with. I was just going to mention the effective date which for the ninety day waiting period would be 07/01/2026. The tax portion there would take effect for this calendar years, this applicable tax calendar year 2026. So that's why it has retroactive effects January 1, so it would impact 2026 tax year. But you can obviously change those, it's a policy decision for you. Questions of Cameron as to what is in this version of the bill. I will say as we will hear an additional testimony, there are all kinds of permutations, including this flat. This is a waiting period and tax depriving people of tax benefits. There are other bills that simply ban the purchase. I was just say, are happy to come back in and talk about what some other states have done? Yes, sir, exactly that point. I mean, are other provisions, bills that I've seen in other states that have similar provisions like this, but I've also seen other bill provisions elsewhere that have more of just an outright ban. Cannot own more than x number of homes, or have seen that you can only purchase x number of homes in any given year. So there are different versions of similar attempts at limiting these types of investments. I think I'm answering questions.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Questions? Ashley? We're talking about single family and double family homes. What about apartments?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: They're not covered by homes. Is

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: it wrong for me to assume that there are private equity firms that do own apartments?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: It should, probably.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Is there a reason that those weren't included?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: I mean, I also would love to mobile

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: would ask Catherine though, I would ask the next witness that question. She might have an answer.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: And it's increasingly an issue in manufactured housing as well, I've read, so again, like, I just put this in as a starting point based on another state that passed it, not to reinvent the wheel. But if the committee wants to change things, I am not wedded to anything.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Well, I think that one of the reasons for having it be single family homes is that private equity firms tend to, in rural states, tend to, and nature driven states tend to buy up single family homes to turn them into Airbnbs, which they can manage as a Short term reasons, I guess, not exactly. So either

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: is to ensure that you're continuing to promote housing ownership. Yeah, right, right.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: The American dream.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Hey Tom, go ahead.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: So in any of the other examples you looked at, was the waiting period always based on time out of the market? Was it ever based on time since first offer or any other final post?

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Trying to remember, there were two bills that I found that have a similar waiting period and they were both similarly drafted. One of them was a sixty day grace period before the purchase, and they were based on the time on the market. On this market.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Okay, so we may want to look at that because I'm thinking we of don't always have the market we have now. If this is 2009, they could have half the state.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Yep. Right. Because stuff had

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: been out for a year at a time, stuff

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: was on

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: the market.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: So And I just wanna also thank Cameron publicly and for the committee because this has been a multi year like multi multi year. I pulled this bill one session because things were really busy and we had a lot going on. And so then But this has been a big lift for a long time to get to a bill. And so I really appreciate your work on It was a heavy lift. Thank you.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: It's fun doing some research on brother Schlitz again. Go ahead. Yes, Chattie. That's work indeed.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Since you're here,

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: I might as just ask the question.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: In the first section of covered entity,

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: can you explain again what the getting a loan for the residence exemption you have.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: So it's a loan provided in exchange. So it's saying that covered entity means an institutional real estate investor as we've defined or an entity that receives funding from an institutional real estate investor. So think about it this way, you have real estate investor, real estate investor sets up a separate entity and I'm gonna funnel money into the separate entity do exactly what they told me I can't do as the institutional real estate investor. And so this separate entity, it's a separate entity is getting a mortgage that was available to other people to purchase a home, we're not going to consider that as a separate entity receiving funding.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay, so I think my mind was going to, I think what I thought I answered for myself was the fact that

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: it has to be of loans available to the general public. Because a lot of investing, they don't actually just stick all their cash somewhere. They use debt to Right. So if they're just using they're just acquiring the buildings, they're getting debt. It would just have to be something that anyone else can get. It can't be the normal channels of Okay.

[Cameron Woodhaughs (Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you. Do you have to go? If I may have your leave, if you have no more questions for me, I'm going go look on the things that I have to do very I don't know. I'm not sure we can deprive ourselves.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you. So next we're going to hear from Katherine Nelson. Katherine, you're here, I believe, on the screen.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Yes, I am here. Good afternoon.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Katherine, I'm Marc Mihaly. We haven't actually personally met, though I attended the conference at which you spoke in Wilmington, the Housing And it's on that basis because of your presentation that I asked that you're invited to come here. This is the house, the general and housing committee of the House of Representatives of the Vermont State Legislature, and we're well aware that perhaps this issue is not as prevalent here as it is in, say, Newark, but it's something that people have been talking about and worrying about, and we're taking advantage of the fact that we have a bill on the subject, which is essentially just a vehicle that allows us to talk about it, to open hearings, and this is literally the commencement of hearings. This week, just to give you background, this week in the legislature is what we call crossover week. It is the week in which bills have to be out of the House of Origin, no, the committee of origin, and then next week, or the week after, voted out for the other house. So, we've done pretty much of that. This bill, it is not likely that this bill, in fact, let's say it's it's this bill is not going to be voted out of this committee in the next two days. So this is our chance to begin the process, and if we're a little ahead of the curve, so be it. So, this is kind of a more of a generic inquiry, and I think what I'll do is ask the committee to introduce itself to you, Debbie, you wanna Just so you know who you're talking to, you can see us, I think, yes.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Yes, yes, I can see you.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I'm Debbie Dolgin. I represent Saint John's Bray, Concord, and Kirby.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Tom Charlton, Athens, Chester, Drafton, and Windham. Joe Parsons.

[Leonora Dodge (Member)]: Leonora Dodge from Essex. Ashley Bartley, Fairfax, Georgia. Marc Mihaly, I'm

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: the chair. I represent Caledonia, Plainfield and Marshfield.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Emilie Krasnow, South Burlington.

[Saudia LaMont (Member)]: Saudia LaMont, Lamoille, Washington District.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: I'm Elizabeth Burrows and I also attended that CSG conference.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: I'm Mary E. Howard and I represent Rutland City District 6. Gayle Pezzo, I represent District 20, Colchester.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: This is there are 150 of us in the house. We have one committee. I know many, many legislatures have multiple committees. We have one. Thank goodness. And this committee, the 11 people on this committee actually represent a pretty much of a good cross section of Vermont ranging from Tom who represents and Joe who represent many small towns, to Debbie, who's in a medium sized town, and those, some people here from the Burlington area, representing, you know, what would be considered a small city elsewhere, and is considered the big city in Vermont. Each of us represents about 4,000 plus people. The total population of Vermont is just north of 600,000. So welcome to Vermont. You want to tell us your name for the record and introduce yourself?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I'd love to. And thank you, chairman, for inviting me here today and for the opportunity to speak with you all about this topic. My name is, I'm Doctor. Katie Nelson, and I am with an organization called Rutgers CLIMB. CLIMB is the Center for Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity. We're based out of the law school, but we are a multidisciplinary research organization with a mission for public scholarship around place based and structural inequality. So, I've been asked to come and speak to you today about institutional investors and single family homes, by which we mean one to four unit homes generally. And this is an issue, we'll say very near and dear to the heart of CLIMB. CLIMB is based in Newark, New Jersey. And we were introduced to this issue of investors in single family homes a number of years ago when a group of community organizations in Newark came to us describing that they were having increasing difficulty accessing properties to be able to rehab and develop for affordable housing and describing a kind of wide spread increase in this we buy homes for cash kind of activity. And they asked us to look into it, which we did. And this was now a few years ago. And the report that we came out with was called Who Owns Newark in which we found pretty dramatically that almost half of all of the homes that were bought and sold from 2017 through the 2020. So, almost half were bought not by a home buyer or a group of home buyers, but by corporations. So that's, you know, different kinds of LLCs or LPs or inks or corpse. We did look very, very closely at all of this data. We pulled out everything that could be a CDC. We pulled out everything that could be a government agency. We pulled out everything that looked like it was going through the foreclosure pipeline in some way, and we were still left with this incredibly large share. We looked at historical data. We found that the percent increase was dramatic. It was a threefold increase in investor buying in just a handful of years, five or six years. And what we were able to discern, and this is corroborated by, other research both in New Jersey and throughout the country, is that this dramatic increase coincided with the foreclosure crisis coming out of the great recession. So that a number of, we'll call them new actors, private equity, other financial institutions got their start in the single family housing market by buying up large numbers of foreclosed homes. And there has been, even as the foreclosure crisis has receded into history, these investors have continued to play a larger role in the single family housing stock than they had previously. The more we looked at this data in Newark, we found that that was heavily concentrated in two sections of the city that are predominantly African American. And in particular, a section in the Eastward that was our kind of historically black homeowner community where we saw, a clear decline in the homeownership rate even as homeownership was going up in other parts of the city during this period. And, the last thing I want to lay out, I think this is a good way to start of so you would know who I am and what animates our work and why we are passionate about it. The other thing that came out of this inquiry was just what it what clearly appeared to us to be a, willful intention to obfuscate the identity of the buyers. And that is not, you know, a generalization across everyone. Certainly, there were, you know, my LLC holding company one, my LLC holding company two, but there were huge numbers of purchases that were by companies whose only we only had a p o like a PO box to go with them. And so we spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out who was related to who. But this obfuscation thing felt very, very important to us because it hits that transparency and accountability. And what, you know, to us ultimately was the biggest takeaway from this project, which is that while, while the actions of these these companies, are are they're not illegal. They they may not even be nefarious in any way, shape or form. Right? This is business. But nevertheless, the outcomes are predatory to the neighborhoods that we were like, particularly the neighborhoods where we were looking at where it was happening on the scale that it was. And the reason that we say that it was predatory is because we're seeing just a change from in the character of neighborhoods that were once, you know, that were once, owner occupied occupied and and and and occupied by, you know, residents who were invested and cared about the the neighborhoods and the community, there's this concern with these larger corporations owning an increasing amount of the housing stock that they don't have a reason to be vested in the things that that we care about, in the in the education, in the parks, in the rec, in the safety, and all of that. So, so that's why we call it predatory. And that is kind of an introduction to me and to CLIMB and to to how we we came into this. And I was thinking I would kind of shift next to the the bigger research on this space and what we know about the actual about institutional investors in single family homes and their impact. But I wanted to but I think maybe now is a good time to pause before I do that potentially opening up a PowerPoint and making it harder for you to interrupt me.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I think you should go ahead.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Okay. Great. So let's see if I can get this to work.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: think I may need permission. You're now the cohost, so I think you could just hit share.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Terrific.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: We see it. We see

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: it. Wonderful. Okay. Slideshow. There we go. So is everybody seeing my slide deck now?

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yep. We see your slide deck, and we see you in your little window.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Perfect, perfect, as it should be. Are the findings from Who Owns Newark, which I think I just talked you through, and I'll just jump to here, which is since we came out with Who Owns Newark, there've been a number of additional studies that picked up on our findings. Most recently, this study came out in December 2025 and looked at the entire state of New Jersey. And what they were doing, what they did was they looked at a snapshot in 2012, a snapshot in 2022, and we're looking at changes across that time in the ownership patterns of investors in the state. And what they found is that corporate ownership more than doubled across the state during that decade. But when we look at the share of the housing stock owned by corporations, it jumped from 1.6% to 3.8%. So I think it's worth pausing here and saying, when you look at these numbers, it doesn't feel like, oh, this a huge share, right? It's relatively modest two to 4%, but this masks amount a of variation from place to place. So in New Jersey, the investors are particularly concentrated in urban areas. So these are our cities throughout the state, not just big cities like Newark, but also smaller cities like Atlantic City. And where there's much, much more local concentration and the highest in our state is Trenton. New Jersey, where more than a quarter of all homes in the city are owned by a corporation. There's also a big pattern with beach towns and things along the coast. So the other thing that they found is that of those corporate properties, more than half a decade ago had been owner occupied. So this represents, this is not just corporations selling to corporations or landlords that have decided they wanna become LLCs. This is in fact a shift, from owner occupied homes to, to corporate owned homes. So why are people concerned about this? And I could go on a long time about this, but I wanna raise what I think are sort of the three main buckets of issues that come out again and again. The first is the way that their activity is crowding out homeownership. So as investors have gotten more involved in the single family housing stop, it has driven up prices and investors often are able to buy with cash, certainly with, lower cost, mortgages, than a traditional home buyer, particularly a home buyer that is a first time home buyer or a low and moderate income home buyer that may need to use something like an FHA or a kind of mortgage credit that's harder to use and compete in an auction against an investor. And sort of underscoring the crowding out of homeownership is that not just in Newark, but consistently across the country, investors have been found to be particularly interested in the starter home market, the most affordable housing markets. Those precise places that are aware low and moderate income people and first time homebuyers would want to be able to buy their home. And so that has a larger impact. The second category of harms is harms to renters. So, these investors associated with higher rents, things like rent setting algorithms. And I don't know how much you have heard about RealPage, but there's this technology that is used, by an algorithms that are used by many of the larger landlords to set their rents. And what that has done in many places is inflate the rents because it tells the landlord the highest sort of the highest rent that they can offer and command in the marketplace. They've also been associated through a series of CFPB studies with more junk fees and other kind of surprise and hidden fees associated with rental transactions. Second, many of them, many investors have been associated with habitability issues, including not repairing units and allowing them to fall into disrepair. And then lastly, particularly the largest corporate investors have been found to be more likely to evict and to be more associated with displacement in general, particularly in gentrifying areas, areas where markets are going up. And then the last kind of bucket is the bucket of accountability and transparency. And this speaks to what I was describing before, but with this, what feels sometimes like an intentional obfuscation of identity. But the truth is that in a lot of states, we do not have particularly good data systems in place to know who owns property and who's renting out property. Rent registries are few and far between. Even the even the kind of recording of an agent owner or a beneficial order on a deed is in many places not required. So, are the sort of like three reasons, three categories of reasons I think why people are particularly concerned about institutional investors right now increasingly so. Okay. So now jumping to the kind of nationwide findings. What you're looking at here, this map is a map from a GAO study that came out a couple of years ago. And as you can see, I don't know if you can see me, let me just move this to be sure. Blue circles on that map there represent the share of the housing stock that is owned, by mega investors. These are investors that own more than a thousand homes in a particular area. And what you'll see is a particular geographic pattern here where, in where a lot of this activity is concentrated in the Sunbelt, in the South, in sections of the Midwest, and in the Southwest. And what I wanna highlight is that these are the mega investors, and that is a term for investors that own, more than a thousand homes in a particular area. What you'll see is there are no blue dots in the Northeast. And that is because I have seen very little in the way of research around mega investors in the Northeast. Investors in the Northeast do not seem to come in the mega variety at least as often. So you've probably heard of Blackstone. You may have heard of Invitation Homes. These are some of the big names in single family rental, the big companies that are buying or buying up properties. And those companies, as far as as far as I have seen, are not active in this part of the country. They're just not. And instead, what we have are smaller, kind of more regional, and a lot of it private equity companies that are purchasing maybe dozens, maybe hundreds, but I'm not convinced that thousands is necessarily the scale at at at which we're talking. Although that's not to say for sure because this is the other piece of it. Most of the research out there is about these large publicly traded companies. And a lot of the activity that we find of investors in in that I found in my research has not been publicly traded. These are not folks that are filing with the SEC. Most of them are private companies, and so it's very difficult to figure out who is related to who and just how many properties they own. So there's a real kind of extra dimension of a challenge of transparency in terms of knowing who these actors are and what they own and what the full scale of their involvement is. So really what I want to underline there is that most of the research that you'll see and that you'll hear and frankly, when you turn on the news and you hear people talking about this issue, most of what they're talking about are these mega investors. But what we have in our markets here in this region is maybe not particularly well captured by these studies. Does that make sense?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Can I ask a question? You can't see me, I don't know. Ahead. Please, go ahead. Thank you.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: How

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: did they gather their data?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: So, there are large I just want

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: to restate more accurately for the committee. How did the other states and this like, how do you is there ways for us to gather, like, yeah, you do my question. Does that

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I understand your question. Understand your question. This research, the research captured by these blue dots, most of it is large scale proprietary datasets like CoreLogic that are purchased usually to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: So we might just be too small to capture that type of group?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Well, so here's how we here's how we did it in Newark and how we've done it in New Jersey is we have looked at transaction data. We've and we've looked at ownership data at the parcel level. And I don't know the level I don't know the level of data I don't know what data sets you have and how how there. I'm happy to help you figure that out. But but so we've used two different data sets. One is a dataset on ownership. So every parcel in the state, we know who owns it, and we have a mailing address for the owner of it. And so we've done what we do what we've done is we've we've, studied the name of the owner, and then we've studied the mailing address and the mailing name of who owns the property. And then we also have used sales transaction data. So, so whenever a deed is recorded, that deed transfer is captured, and we have the name of the buyer, the name of the seller, and then mailing address information of the buyer. So those have been our free, datasets that we've used to look at this to look at this here in here in New Jersey. Elizabeth,

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: go ahead.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: If you and I'll I'll tell you the other place to talk the other place to talk to if you don't wanna do this work yourself. The other place to talk to is the Urban Institute. The Urban Institute is the sort of one kind of public. They they have the national dataset, and they've done studies nationwide. So they would potentially have data in house if you didn't have something, you know, locally or statewide that you could use.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Elizabeth? I was just gonna say that, I'm a huge lifelong fan of the Urban Institute's work. I attended two webinars that they had in the last, I don't know, eight months on this issue. One of them was really interesting. They don't collect data for states like ours because we are so far from urban or we're so far outside of their area of expertise or interest. But I was gonna say that one of the things that I thought was really, like, kind of reading between the lines of one of the presentations was about it was a panel, and there was a person from New Mexico and a person from California and a person from, I think, the Detroit area. And they were talking about an occurrence in Cleveland, Ohio, in which a private equity firm bought up a majority of the housing in this neighborhood, and then they wanted to get rid of the school. And so they bought up all of this housing. They devalued the housing to get rid of the school. And then once the school shuttered, they jacked everything back up and replaced it with charter schools. And I I think that that's actually a, you know, kind of a hidden piece is that while you've got the you know, this is from Urban Institute data, like, you've got 5% in Cincinnati, 2% in Columbus, but they are also causing this kind of change. Even if it's a small percentage, they're still causing this kind of change in specific areas. Like, know from knowing somebody who was a a private equity investor that a lot of Syracuse, for example, was bought up by private equity in the during the foreclosure crisis. And while it doesn't necessarily like, you see 25 in Georgia or in the Atlanta area, that looks really significant. But also, there are these other very localized impacts that feel really outsized to the area that they're affecting. And I just wanted to point that out because it doesn't necessarily show up on overall data.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Catherine, is

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: this 100%. Yes.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I just want to understand this chart. Is this chart limited? I mean, as I remember, sort of one way of thinking about this is institutional investors being investors that are publicly traded, publicly available information like BlackRock, then private equity, are not. Is this institutional investors, this chart?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: So

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Or does it also include private equity?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: So, well, let me say it let me say it this way. The definition of institutional investors as I understand it is that, these are entities which invest on behalf of a group of investors in housing or homes. Right. And so it's less about whether it's publicly or privately traded, and it's more about it's more about that relationship, whether there's a group of investors behind it. This dataset, this analysis, which I'm pretty confident is the urban data, the urban institute data, It wouldn't in theory disqualify private equity from being involved, but I don't know how much private equity exists at this enormous scale of a thousand homes or more. Okay.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So, this is just either private equity or publicly traded. It's just people who own entities that own over a thousand homes.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Correct. Correct.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Go ahead then.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Yes. So that actually takes us straight to definitions, and I appreciate the segue. So institutional investors, they invest money in homes in behalf of other investors. They may be publicly traded, like REITs, for example, are all publicly traded, but others may be private equity. They come in all sizes. Typically, the larger it is, the more likely it is to be publicly traded. Once you hit a certain size, it's much, much more likely that you're gonna be you're gonna be you know, that that that you will be filed with the SEC. But it is not at all uncommon for, for investors, for private equity that have dozens or hundreds of homes to not necessarily be publicly to not file. Right? And so we don't then, therefore, have some of the other publicly available data that we would have about them. The other clarification I want to make in the terminology here, is between a corporate owner and an institutional investor. The way that we've done our research and the way that, most of the research is done in this space is not actually identifying an institutional investor. Rather, what we're doing is we're identifying owners who own a lot of a lot of the housing stock, and we're doing so by identifying corporate owners. So a corporate owner is just any buyer that uses an LP or an LLC or an ink. Right? And it is increasingly common over the last couple of decades, even for for people that that just are purchasing one property to do so with an LLC. So you don't you know, the when we talk when I talk about corporate ownership, and corporate buying, that's a very heterogeneous group. It's not you should not think that all of them are institutional investors. Some of them some of them may be small scale landlords. They may even be, you know, family trusts, something like that. And so just be aware, just be just be aware of that. When we come down to, like, talking about regulation and legislation, often, I've seen that that, folks are using terms like institutional investor when when they in regulations. But in practice, what they're really doing is they're talking about how many units someone owns who's a corporate entity. Does that make sense? I just wanna pause there too. I don't know if if this is all obvious, but it gets complicated.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Go ahead.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Okay. Great. So, and I think at this point, I've said this. In this region, in the Northeast generally, you know, corporate owners of homes are more often not publicly traded, and they are more often local and regional entities that are mostly unknown, or largely often unknown to the public. So I'm going to jump to the study that CLIMB subsequently did in Philadelphia. We did this with partners at the reinvestment fund and the housing initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, where the goal was we were start at this point, you know, we had started to see numbers on the share of units that were being bought, and owned by corporations and seeing that some of them, particularly in cities like Philadelphia, were getting were were relatively large. And so our motivating questions were, who are these investors specifically? What are they doing with the homes once they acquire them? And what's the impact on our neighborhood? But really, we we wanted to get a better handle on who they were. And these are our findings. We identified the kind of largest corporate buyers as those that bought a 100 or more homes, during the time of our study. And what we found is the vast majority of them were a lot of them were homegrown or they were regional companies. Many of them were relatively new on the scene, and many of them were not household names that anyone had ever heard of. And so I'm listing them here. I suspect they will not mean much, and if anything, to you up in Vermont. They certainly didn't mean much to us here in Philadelphia. But this is the point that a lot of these are are companies that are not household names. They're new. They're local. They're private. And while some of them had, you know, publicly facing websites and we could gather information about them, Many of them, there was, like, zero information publicly at all. This second one, JDJ Investments, which acquired 377 homes over a six year period, no one had ever heard of them before. They don't have a website. They don't They don't have paperwork anywhere. All I could find was a one-eight hundred number.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Sorry. All you said was what?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I didn't mean a one-eight hundred number. A 215 number, which is our local area code. 215 number, which I called many times and got several people on the phone and then decided that this was not research. This was, this was moving in the in the direction of reporting. So I I yes. I'll I'll I'm I'm going I'm going off I'm going off off off trail here, so I'm gonna I'm gonna stop. But the point is that that, you know, these are not these are not the black stones in the invitation homes. It's in the research. A lot of this, a lot of what we're finding is that is that they're local. And so that requires local research to figure out who they are, and and and to to gain a handle on what it is they're buying and where and what impact they're having. In Philadelphia, we found an increased likelihood of code violations compared to home buyers, which wasn't particularly surprising. But we did find that the largest corporate buyers were much more likely to evict Within four years of acquiring a home, roughly 14% of the tenants, who lived in those who had lived in those residences had been filed against. So that should say 14 per so of the of the homes purchased by the largest corporation, so any corporation that bought a 100 or more homes in the city of Philadelphia over a six year period, 14% of the tenants residing in those units had cases had were, had eviction cases filed against them.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: Small coverage compared to 4%.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: And what's really striking about that is this includes the time period of the pandemic when there was an eviction moratorium in effect, which suggests the numbers are under what we might have found had we continued the study an additional couple of years. Like the New York study, we found that the investors were much, much more concentrated in majority black, but also majority Hispanic neighborhoods in Philadelphia. So, well, you know what? I'm gonna pause here because I'm about to shift to sort of legislation related stuff. So maybe I'll pause and see if you Go have any ahead.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Katie, can I ask you a quick question about this?

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: So

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: what is it about those communities that makes them targets? Have you talked about this already and I've missed it?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: No, I don't. I mean, I so I did not make the direct linkage. Investors are particularly interested in our most affordable housing stock. So they're interested in those places where the sales prices are the lowest. And so that is part, I think, of the answer to your question of why they predominate in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, at least in in the cities that I have studied. But the other piece to say here is that, they are also more likely to go after the homes that are in need of repairs. And this is where it becomes, like, a little bit where where to me there's nuance and and there's and there's some serious questions. We have an aging housing stock, both in throughout New Jersey and Philadelphia, this whole region, have an aging housing stock. And a lot of it is in need of, you know, serious reinvestment. And sometimes it's on a scale that individual homebuyers, cannot it's harder for them to do. It's easier for companies to do, for private equity companies to do. And so a piece of what's going on here, I think, I'm I'm sure, is that they're buying homes in need of repair, and they're making very necessary and very important, you know, upgrades and repairs to those buildings. But it's a real outstanding question, I think, how much of that repair is actually happening. And I have not seen good research yet, and it probably varies a lot from place to place and from company to company. But that's the I think the other the other piece of the answer to your question about about why they're in why they're in particular neighborhoods and parts of the city that are also that are majority minority.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Let me ask you a question. I mean, personally, I'm interested in not just who they are, but what they do. Because after all, the harm is in part what they do. Yeah. Have you seen so I'm thinking, what are alright. So, they acquire a lot of houses. What are they gonna do with them? I mean, there's the intrinsic harm you mentioned, transitioning the neighborhood from a ownership neighbourhood to a rental neighbourhood. Yep. Another harm is perhaps buying homes in need of repair, which although they're in need of repair, they were owned by people of lower income than repairing them and flipping them to higher income people. But Yeah. Have you guys studied what the fate of these homes are? What's happening in these homes?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I would say that we started to. I don't think we've gone nearly far enough. So with this study, essentially, we defined high volume investors and those were those that acquired here here, it's, the top 17, but we looked specifically at at any at all of the ones that had acquired, at least a 100 properties. Virtually all of them were large scale corporate landlords. So they were acquiring these properties to rent them out. There were you know, there's a couple more development companies. We did not see much in the way of evidence of flipping, at least in this market. So most were buying to rent out. And so we we know that the biggest ones, that's what they're doing. What we don't know is, what kinds of repairs and what quality of repairs they're making, nor do we have good data on what happens to the rents of the people that live there. There's a lot of kind of anecdotal evidence that you hear that that corporate investors raise the rents and that rents are going up, but but but I I I more research is needed in that space. And, you know, I yeah. I mean, I guess I I stated the eviction finding and the displacement finding. I think that is where we see where we have found the greatest evidence of what is happening on the properties once they are acquired. Did that answer your question? I did my best.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I think so, yes. Okay. Go ahead. Okay.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: So, wanted to preface this with efforts, with the national efforts, that are going on right now. In January, president Trump, fairly surprisingly to many of us issued an executive order calling for a ban of institutional investors in single family homes. Then he, he reiterated that at his state of the union address. Just in the last couple of weeks, we have had two competing bills, come out in Congress. One is the Homes for American Families Act, and this one, I think this one kind of draws directly on the executive order that bans, companies with more than a $150,000,000 in assets from buying single family homes, townhouses, condominiums. The other bill, the American Homeownership Act, was, cosponsored by a dozen or so democrats, and its approach is different. It's primarily, calling for, eliminating tax breaks that encourage corporations to operate in single family real estate. So that includes the the kind of mortgage depreciation and the mortgage interest. And, it also calls for ban for banning them from access to federally backed mortgages and to access to foreclosure auctions. Now I will say that my news told me that something another bill has come out just in the last hour today, but I haven't been able to look at that. So, but to let you know, this this this is moving fast at the national level, and there's this, we'll just say, very rare bipartisan interest in passing something related to housing affordability generally, but, including some piece of regulating or banning or in in some ways, in some ways reducing the role of private equity institutional investors in homes.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Have you

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: noticed So with that Go ahead. Sorry.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Have you noticed I mean, one of the things that I've seen over my lifetime is that in various fields, when the federal government enters an area, the regulated community may support it if it contains a prohibition on state action. In other words, if it preempts state action. Have you seen whether either of these bills preempt state action?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I have not seen that, but I think that's a very smart question.

[Mary E. Howard (Clerk)]: A very,

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: very smart question.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: You haven't seen it as in you don't know or you've looked at it and you don't

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: see it? I've looked at that second bill fairly closely, the American Homeownership Act, and I didn't see anything in there that did. Have to admit, all I have read is a summary of the Homes of the Homes for for Families Act.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Okay.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: But I'm going to write this down. It's something that I'll take a look. I will definitely look into.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Elizabeth, you have a question.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Katie, is the Homes for Families Act totally different from the Road to Housing Act?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Yes. Okay. But my understanding is the bill that came out today includes something investors. I just haven't had a chance to look at the details, so it could be that everything is being merged.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Okay. Good. I I'd I'd like that I know that they use these titles to make them more memorable, but they're so generic that they're totally

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: That they're not at all memorable. Yeah. Yeah.

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: Thank you for

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: clarifying. Yeah. There been any action under the executive order by any agency?

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I I I have I have read that they're looking into it. It like but I have not seen anything come out. No. With more detail, unfortunately. I think it's worth pausing here to say too that because of the world we're living in right now, the word affordability well, unaffordability is at the center of a whole lot of these debates, and a whole lot of these discussions. And I think that's important, and I wanna raise it because while affordability is a piece of the problems or the challenges posed by investors in single family homes, it's by no stretch of the imagination the only one. And I have been a little bit concerned by some of the things I've seen put out that sort of narrowly talk about the institutional investor issue as an affordability issue when I think it that that kind of pushes aside it pushes aside a lot of the habitability questions, which I think are front and center, the displacement questions that should be front and center. And, I mean, it kinda gets indirectly at the rents and the pricing algorithms, but it, you know, I I think it it's a narrow slice. And and I I think the national legislation, that conversation is is very much this narrow slice of affordability.

[Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member)]: Right.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Okay. So approaches to regulating investors. And I'll say that this list came about, well, it started in New Jersey because it came to my attention that there were about a dozen bills floating through legislature that had been introduced within a year around the topic of institutional investors. And that prompted me to go start looking at what was going on in other state houses all across the country. And so these buckets, like these four categories, this is what came out of this, you know, sort of lit review, if you will, that I did, of of different attempts at the state level across the country to to to address these to address these issues. I have not seen much that has passed at all at the state level, but there are bills moving all over the place and there's a whole lot of activity. So I think there's that to note. So the the first category of bill is around transparency. And these are bills that, that usually require the disclosure of ownership information either when a deed is transferred. So during a transaction, a sales transaction of a of a real property from one party to another party or, some sort of attempt at, at a kind of annual or regular reporting, by property owners about what properties they own and where and how many. And then and these are kind of tied to to different conversations around developing rent registries, either locally, but but at the state level as well. These transparency laws tend to consider registered agents. And and this is gonna this is gonna vary state to state based on what, you know, particular laws and regulations are in place. But consider the the registered agents and, very much, beneficial owners. And, requiring, submitting a bet the a beneficial owner or even even better, all of the beneficial owners above a certain category, a certain percentage of ownership is increasingly something that is being put in these bills. And finally, thinking about establishing penalties for noncompliance and how to do that. The second category, are called first look laws. And really what first look laws are are, usually it places a time period where, homebuyers, traditional homebuyers are able to bid on a property, but, corporations must wait. So you may have like a thirty day first look law where once a property goes to market, LLCs and other companies are not allowed to bid on that property for thirty days. And the intention the intention here is to, give that priority to the home buyer, give them that extra time to be able to to enter the market and buy the home. And I've seen first look laws, I mean, in in dozens of states, people are talking about them, both in the general housing market, but also narrowly, at share of sales and in foreclosure auctions. Right? The third, like, bucket that I'm seeing, or third bucket, out there is taxation. So these are kind of various different efforts, to place taxes on, any corporation that buys homes above some specified amount. Maybe it's that you buy a home, after your twentieth or maybe it's your fiftieth or maybe it's your hundredth. But the notion is, the notion is there's there's some cap on how how many homes we think one entity should be able to have. And beyond that, you are taxed. Often, these are structured so that the level of the tax or the amount that you have to pay is larger depending on how many homes you own you already own. Alternatively, I've seen some efforts to put an annual tax on property ownership above a certain number of properties owned. So that's not just at the, you know, the transaction at the sale, but, tries to get at those, those, entities that already have large numbers of homes in their portfolios. What else was I going to say about that? I thought I was going to say something.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Just to let you know, we're kind of running out of time.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Sure. I can go faster. There's only one more slide after this.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay. And we do have your slides. And we will be in touch. You are not getting off the book.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: Yes. You will have my slides. And yes, I would love to continue to be in touch, and to be a resource to you however I can, as as you're thinking about these questions. The the the final bucket I'll just say is indirect. And these are, you know, kinda different different ways of regulating the activity of investors without actually going after them directly. And this includes everything from leveling the playing field to homeowners through like, you know, down payment assistance programs, that sort of thing, or taxing some of the negative externalities that have come up, be it, you know, around vacancy, a vacancy tax if you're seeing flipping or proactive inspection programs to respond investors that have accumulated a whole mass of code violations. So the kind of bad actors. And I just wanted to end with, some considerations, three in particular. The first one is defining an institutional investor. We've talked about this a little bit, but I just wanted to underline it that really the way that investor in single family homes or housing more generally is spelled out in regulation is typically based on the number of units that they own. There are other ways of doing it around the profit margin or the size of the organization. That becomes tricky because a lot of these aren't just doing single family housing. They're active in other parts of the housing market or real estate market. So the the kind of minimum number of units is the standard approach. I wanted to under underline the constrained housing supply that we live in, and that there are serious concerns about not wanting to regulate investors in such a way that we are not building homes at a time when we desperately need to build homes. And then finally, this presentation has been all about single family housing, but particularly with questions about transparency and particularly with questions of regulation, multifamily housing should also be under consideration and thought about as you're sort of trying to figure out how to legislate in this space. And I'll stop there.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Well, thank you so much. What I'm gonna do is just let you know that we will this is an ongoing project for us to look at more. We're going to hear from, like, six more witnesses this week, and then we may be back in touch. Did you want to say something? I did. Emilie is the author of this

[Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. This bill. I just wanted to thank you publicly so much for this was incredible information. This is a project I've been working on for a few years and just grateful for the information that you provided across the country at this conference. And we have your slides and many of us can reach out now we have contacts. So, thank you so much. This has been incredibly helpful.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: I'm so glad. I'm glad I could be here. Let know if I can continue to help and support.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Dr. Katie (Katherine) Nelson (Rutgers CLIMB)]: All right, thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Sure. Okay, so we're gonna now We don't have

[Elizabeth Burrows (Member)]: slides up on today's date. Are they They're coming.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And I actually have them there, the same slides that were used before. And we're now gonna take a break. We'll come back here. It's kind of a bio break, short break. Why don't we come back here at 02:30? We're gonna hear from four witnesses, and we only have an hour. So Oh. Yeah.