BY BEN HALLMAN
PREVIOUS PAGE: STEPHEN SWINTEK/GETTY IMAGES
There’s no escaping the
stench of raw sewage
in Mindy Culpepper’s
Atlanta-area rental home.
The odor greets her before she
turns into her driveway each evening as she returns from work. It’s
there when she prepares dinner,
and only diminishes when she and
her husband hunker down in their
bedroom, where they now eat
their meals.
For the $1,225 a month she pays
for the three-bedroom house in
the quiet suburb of Lilburn, Culpepper thinks it isn’t too much to
expect that her landlord, Colony
American Homes, make the necessary plumbing repairs to eliminate
the smell. But her complaints have
gone unanswered, she said. Short
of buying a plane ticket to visit
the company’s office in Scottsdale,
Ariz., she is out of ideas.
“You cannot get in touch with
them, you can’t get them on the
phone, you can’t get them to respond to an email,” said Culpepper,
whose family has lived with the
problem since the day they moved
in five months ago. “My certified
letters, they don’t get answered.”
Most rental houses in the U.S.
are owned by individuals, or
small, local businesses. Culpepper’s landlord is part of a new
breed: a Wall Street-backed investment company with billions
of dollars at its disposal. Over the
past two years, Colony American
and its two biggest competitors,
Invitation Homes and American
Homes 4 Rent, have spent more
than $12 billion buying and renovating at least 75,000 homes in
order to rent them out.
This new incursion by hedge
funds and private equity groups
into the American single-family
home rental market is unprecedented, and is proving disastrous
for many of the tens of thousands
of families who are moving into
these newly converted rental
homes. In recent weeks, HuffPost