Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is getting into the real estate business, and that’s VERY bad news for home buyers. Bezos’ plan would jack up home prices and put ownership out of reach for millions of Americans. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is getting into the real estate business and it’s very bad news for home buyers. Bezos’ plan would jack up home prices and put ownership outta reach of millions America. The chances of an emerging generation Z buying a home right now, what the statistics I saw were almost, almost impossible.
Farron Cousins: Right. And it is, and Jeff Bezos sees what these other groups are doing, what BlackRock is doing, what the rest of Wall Street is doing. And Bezos says, well, hey, Amazon can get into that. So they’ve made this new company called, what is it, Arrived. Arrived is the name of the company. And what it is, is it allows just your average everyday investors, you can put in a hundred dollars here, maybe $500 there, and you own a share of this single family home that Jeff Bezos has bought. So then, you own 0.5% of it.
Mike Papantonio: If that, I mean, you own 0.000 because Bezos has put $25 million in to your little $100.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So then when it sells, you get that percentage of the sale price and people think, hey, this is a good idea. But it’s gambling on the market with these homes, because they go in, they make a couple of small minor improvements that really don’t mean anything, and they jack up the price by 250 grand.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they want these people to be renters. We want a nation of renters. We don’t want a nation of homeowners. I wish I could call on the statistic, it’s kicking around in my head, but the chances of a generation Z or even a millennial owning their own home right now is so diminished. And so they’re counting on that. The economy is such that somebody trying to move into the job market, if you’re generation Z or millennial, it’s very, very tough to make the kind of money it takes to buy a house. So he says, ah, that’s a great opportunity. People are suffering. Let me come on in and give them rental property. So it’s a buy-up of rental property. We talked about this before. We’ve done a couple of stories on this where Wall Street’s trying to buy everything. Close down entire neighborhoods where it’s their rental property. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They’ve almost in some areas bought entire cities.
Mike Papantonio: Yes. Yes. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: At this point. And you can’t buy those homes anymore, but you can surely pay your little monthly fee to live here until we say, okay, you’ve gotta get out, we’re gonna make room for somebody better. And meanwhile, obviously the wealthy people like we had talked about, they’re building their own special city high up in the mountains with their golden gates that nobody can get in.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Wow. Great movie there. Isn’t it?
