[mikeyouse]

I fully appreciate why people are pissed about the housing situation - I bought my first house last year and the process was a tire fire, we ended up offering on maybe 3 or 4 other places before this one? And it wasn't even in a "top tier" city.

I'm sure there's a ton of investor interest (which in my opinion, is "downstream" of the problem, e.g. the millions-of-homes shortage is making it an attractive investment which is bringing the investor money). But again, Blackrock is a very small player in this - I can guarantee you that wealthy boomers with one or two rental properties are a much larger ownership class of investment properties than any faceless PE firm.

Blackrock owns a few tens of thousands of homes in specific cities (https://lease.invitationhomes.com/search?_ga=2.31151100.2135...), and sure, they're causing more competition and higher prices there -- but it's a nationwide problem not so easily reduced to "private equity caused".