The Impact of Corporate Landlords on the Structure of the Residential Rental Market
Fall 2023
This research investigates the impact of Real Estate Investment Firms (REIFs) on the rental market since the 2008 financial crisis, with a particular focus on their contribution to the post-COVID rent surge. The project will develop a dataset linking property ownership and rental history to assess the extent of corporate ownership, its influence on rent distribution, and its role in rent price setting. The study will employ various computational methods, including the extracting REIFs from landlord data using Natural Language Processing, and identifying price-setter and follower relationships through Deep Embedded Clustering based on Dynamic Time Warping similarity, to analyze nearly 200 million data points. The findings will enrich research in Sociology, Economics, Public Policy, Urban Studies, and Geography by shedding light on the microscopic dynamics of market shock diffusion and the impact of external conditions on strategic market behaviors. Expected to be widely disseminated through an online dashboard and media articles, these findings will be crucial for understanding market dynamics and guiding future regulations to manage rent increases, thereby addressing critical issues of affordability and social mobility.