George Kamel - The Hidden Force Driving Up Home Pricing

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

🏠 Check out the home-buying course!   You don’t need me to tell you that buying a house is more expensive than ever. But why has it gotten so bad? Part of the problem is billion-dollar companies buying up homes like Pokémon cards. Let me explain what I mean.    Next Steps: • 🎥 Watch my video Why This Viral Mortgage Hack Is a Terrible Idea! • 💵 Start your free budget today. Download the EveryDollar app! • 📈 Are you on track with the Baby Steps? Get a free personalized plan.   Connect With Our Sponsors: • Get a $5 credit when you join Privacy. • Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. • Go to Boost Mobile to switch today!  • Go to FAIRWINDS Credit Union for an exclusive account bundle!   Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 📈 EntreLeadership   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don't need me to tell you that buying a house is more expensive than ever. But why has it gotten so bad? Is it inflation? Interest rates? Boomers who won't sell, even though they've already got one foot in a crematorium? Yes. All of the above, yes. But there's another reason you can't find a house.

Billion-dollar companies buying them up like Pokemon cards. These businesses turn neighborhoods into rental portfolios, jack up local housing prices, and get a hall pass from the government. Let me explain what I mean right after giving a pinky up to delete me for sponsoring the channel. They're fancy like that. After the 2008 financial crisis, millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. Home prices cratered, neighborhoods hollowed out, and Blackstone showed up. Blackstone is a private equity firm, meaning a group of investors, buys assets, helps them grow or improve, and then sells them for a profit.

And Blackstone's name just sounds like a villain, almost like a Voldemort's cousin who shall be named. A little twist there. Didn't see that coming. And around 2012, Blackstone started buying up thousands of single-family homes. And they grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions through local brokers and in bulk purchases directly from banks. You know, the same way you stocked up on Scott 1000 TP during COVID. I know it was all they had on the shelf, but that is no excuse.

No excuse. Takes a thousand sheets just to get clean down there. That's why they call it that. Blackstone even bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single transaction. At one point, they even spent $4 billion. in a single year to acquire 24,000 rental properties nationwide. At a pace of over $75 million a week, $75 million per week on houses. That's a half a million bucks per hour.

Now, fast forward to 2021, Blackstone spent $6 billion to purchase home partners of America, another private equity firm known for scooping up single-family homes. Then in 2024, they acquired a single-family rental giant named TriCon Residential in another 10-figure deal. According to their most recent estimate, their single-family portfolio stands at over 60,000 homes. And they're not alone here. Progress Residential holds close to 100,000 single-family homes. Invitation homes, which used to be a part of Blackstone, holds 86,000. So together, just three companies own nearly a quarter million homes

that could otherwise be on the market for regular buyers like you and me. Which brings us to an important question. How does that affect you and me? Well, the TLDR, these companies are taking advantage of regular people. Here's how. Normally, home buying works like this. You spend years building up savings and getting to a place where you have some good financial footing. You find the house, you make an offer, and you hope someone doesn't outbid you. Private equity home buying works like this. You have $3.5 billion from a fund. You identify a target market, and you make 47 different cash offers at the same exact time. That is not a fair fight. It's like they're bringing Serena Williams to Pickleball Night and you're bringing a me. And listen, I'm dangerous in the kitchen, but I will start a fire. They call me Gordon Ramsey because I'm laying it down in the kitchen. That's a pickleball reference.

You wouldn't understand. Got no Riz on the court. Now, these companies will all tell you the same thing. We only own 1% of the market. It's not a big deal. And they're technically right. Nationally, institutional homebuyers own less than 1% of the total U.S. single-family stock. But here's the thing.

1% overall doesn't mean 1% everywhere. Take Atlanta, for example. In Atlanta's most concentrated zip codes, over 350 investors own more than one in 10 homes and account for over 25% of active for sale listings. One in four. So if you're a first-time home buyer looking for a starter house in the home of the Braves, Falcons, and a 24-7 traffic jam, you're not competing with other homebuyers. You're competing with investors who own a quarter of the city's housing stock. And Atlanta's not the only city with a major share of its housing inventory owned by these firms.

Private equity firms own one in five single-family homes in Charlotte and Jacksonville, one in seven homes in Tampa, Orlando, and Phoenix, and so on and so forth and what have you. Insert yada yada, clip from Seinfeld. Do you think he's trying to tell us something? Now, clearly, this is a real problem, which means the government is definitely going to do something about it, right? Kind of. Earlier this year, the Senate passed the 21st century Road to Housing Act. Legal name? Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream.

Now, personally, I think they should have called it the George Act. generating excessive optimism regarding government effectiveness. I think that worked. Nailed it. Here's why. The bill is designed to restrict private equity's ability to hoard single-family homes, and it passed by a landslide 89 to 10 vote. The bill then went to the House, where it passed in another runaway vote, 396 to 13. Between those two votes, though, the bill underwent a bit of a change overnight, which I recently explained on The Ramsey Show. So there's a lot of good things in the bill.

Here's the catch, Rachel. This is government for you. So the Senate passed that. But it goes to the House now. Well, the House released their own amended version, and they quietly stripped out these key provisions that gave the bill its teeth. So they kept the name and they removed all the substance. And the House vote is happening this Wednesday. And so if this weakened version passes, these protections are gone, which sucks.

So we don't want it now. We do not want this House bill to pass. And so, listen, I'm not a person who thinks. thinks I can sway government. But if this matters to you, and I think it should, I would let my House representative know. To say no. Yeah, this is one of those times where you go find your rep, 60 seconds, go to house.com. We'll drop a link in the description to make it easy for you, and tell them to keep the protections in place and to say no to this bill on Wednesday. And, you know, Congress hears from lobbyists every day. They almost never hear from regular people like

you and I, and that's the gap you can fill. Pretty good, right? I thought I did a decent job. Now, to be fair, there's some real debate here. economists argue that institutional investors actually bring down rents in some markets by adding supply through build to rent. Take it from this Washington Post op-ed, which warned that the seven-year timeline would lead to, quote, the evisceration of one of the fastest growing and most promising sources of new family-oriented housing in the United States today. Someone has a journalism degree. Now, if there's any lesson to be learned in this political mess, it's that the government isn't coming to save you, and they can't do much about it even if they wanted to. Thanks, lobbyists.

You're welcome. How is that a job? How is that somebody's job? It's like the mafia, but for government. Besides, even if private equity disappeared tomorrow, housing prices wouldn't come down overnight. We'd still be stuck with limited supply, permitting nightmares, zoning issues,

crazy construction costs, and a million other problems that have gotten us to where we are. So, what is the solution here? I'll let you know in just a second. First, though, let's solve a different problem. Phone planes that cost way more than they should. And luckily, the answer is simple. Switching to Boost Mobile, a sponsor of today's video.

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And before I show you how to become a homeowner in this economy, let me walk you through my favorite way to shop online without handing a real debit card number to every website you buy something from. It all starts at privacy.com, another sponsor of today's episode. They create virtual card numbers linked to your bank account so online stores never see your actual info. Each card can lock to a single merchant, so even if a site gets breached, there's not much a fraudster can do with it. And the good news is privacy doesn't sell your data. They make money from merchant fees, which is how they keep the service free. So sign up today and you'll receive a $5 credit just for being a fan of this channel.

You got nothing to lose and only five bucks to gain. Go check it out. Privacy.com slash George. All right, we've established that waiting around for Congress to make housing more affordable is pointless. Which brings me to the actual solution, personal responsibility. But not in a boomer telling you to work harder and pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of way. Hear me out. The way I see it, you got three options. Option one, you get mad about the economy, complain about it,

spend years waiting on the government to actually be helpful for once, and five to ten years down the road, you've made precisely zero progress. Now, option two, you say Yolo and buy a house you can't afford out of desperation. And now you've got a mortgage payment taken up over half your take-home pay and all the financial responsibility to cover repairs and maintenance, and somehow you have to afford the rest of your bills and life and goals. In a few years in, you'll likely call the Ramsey show. I will answer and likely tell you the truth you already know.

Could you sell the horse? You probably need to sell this house, and it was a mistake. Now, let's move on to door number three. You come to grips with the fact that buying a home is outrageously more expensive than it was before 2020. You decide to be patient and spend five to ten years getting out of debt, getting an emergency fund in place, saving up diligently for a down payment, and focusing on increasing your income to the point that a mortgage will fit into your budget. Meanwhile, you rent an apartment and enjoy a few years of not having to pay for repairs and maintenance. Now, which option seems best to you?

I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but I'm going to assume you can see that option three is the best long-term, play. Now I get that this is easier said than done, especially with genuine enemies like Blackstone making your life more difficult. But throwing up your hands in defeat is not the way to get back at them. It's a weeny move. An L7 weenie move. Not safe for homeschoolers. The better path is to take matters into your own hands and decide once and for all that you're going to do what it takes to buy a home in this economy, even if it's not tomorrow. And if you think that's not possible, then allow me to introduce you to Francisco Vasquez. He's a 27-year-old from Milwaukee, who beat the odds and became a homeowner earlier this year.

After earning a degree in conservation science, he realized that jobs in that field didn't pay very well, so he moved and took a higher-paying management role in the fast food industry. Now, he didn't love it, but it helped him pile up cash. For over two years, Francisco saved roughly 70% of his income, and eventually he made a strong down payment on a $220,000 home on a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. Now, I can already hear the complaints.

George, where am I going to find a $220,000 home? That's not the point. The point is that Francisco became a homeowner by making sacrifices. Now for you, those sacrifices may be choosing a career field with more earning potential, moving to a more affordable area, waiting longer than you wanted to to become a homeowner, avoiding debt, saving consistently, spending conservatively, choosing a townhome or condo a little further out versus a single family home, whatever you got to do to make this work. And if you're not willing to do those things, that's fine.

Just know it's going to mean renting for the foreseeable future. So it's going to take sacrifices, it's going to take some compromise, and it's going to take some time. But the bottom line is this. Private equity is making an already bad housing market worse in some cities. And yes, it is frustrating to watch billion-dollar firms buy up houses faster than you can buy ingredients for your new angel shrimp recipe. And yeah, it'd be nice if Washington could fix the problem tomorrow, but you can only build a real plan around what you control. Focus on those things long enough, and eventually you'll be holding the keys to your own place in an Instagram post that makes all of us a little bit envious. Now, if you want a step-by-step plan for buying a house in this crazy economy, check out my free course,

how to buy a home you can actually afford. I'm biased, but I think it's fantastic. And by the way, it's free, so you get your money back if you don't like it. I'll drop a link in the description below if you want to check it out. And no matter what you do, don't let your frustration about the housing market cause you to fall for some kind of dangerous mortgage trap, like the one I broke down in this video. So click here to watch it next or use the link in the description. That's it for today.

Thanks for watching. See you next time.