This is the biggest story that you have not heard of.

It is an utter and absolute disaster for the American middle-class.

If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund
Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices

A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market.

D.R. Horton Inc. built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale. The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of about 150,000 individuals.

The country’s most prolific home builder booked roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to investors.

From individuals with smartphones and a few thousand dollars to pensions and private-equity firms with billions, yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip. They are competing for houses with ordinary Americans, who are armed with the cheapest mortgage financing ever, and driving up home prices.

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” said John Burns, whose eponymous real estate consulting firm estimates that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in. “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive,” he said.

“Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble,” the firm concluded.

Burns counted more than 200 companies and investment firms in the house hunt: computer-assisted flipper Opendoor Technologies Inc., money managers including J.P. Morgan Asset Management and BlackRock Inc., platforms such as Fundrise and Roofstock that buy and arrange for the management of rentals on behalf of individuals and builder LGI Homes Inc., which now reports wholesale home sales to bulk buyers in its quarterly results.

Those companies named above represent trillions of dollars in investment money.

BlackRock is a partner with the Federal Reserve.  It is leveraging government money to buy houses as rental properties.

Homeownership has long been a bedrock means of establishing wealth for the middle-class.

You own your home, it builds equity, you have real property.

Now, the investment banks are going to make sure that the middle-class never owns a home again.  We will be renters our entire lives, paying more for houses than ever before.  Literally taking all the equity the middle-class has built up over generations and putting it in the pockets of Wall Street executives.

Sure, the people who own their homes now will cash out, but the new home market and all future buyers will be screwed.

This is the iretriduction of feudalism.  The billionaire class will own all the land and the rest of us are just tenants, never owning property, just renting from our masters.

This should be banned immediately, but we all know it won’t because the politicians and elites hate the middle-class and are making too much money from this.

Before we are all returned to serfdom, it might be worth studying up on French history, starting about 1789.