[jyl]

Zillow has a conflict of interest. It is an iBuyer, meaning it buys and sells houses for its own account.

Financial, investment, and technology firms are coming together to make houses just another commodity to be traded and accumulated. Proptech, baby!

Becoming a financialized commodity means individual buyers getting outcompeted, less owner-occupancy, more houses in rental fleets, trillions of taxpayer subsidy, and probably even more boom-bust dynamics.

This has been going on in a big way since at least the GFC.

Politicians, even "progressive" ones, have said little about this - some because they get money from financial, investment, and technology firms, others because they equate home ownership with landed gentry etc, many because they are clueless. Left-wing political activists don't understand financial stuff and many of them are firmly in the renter class. Right-wing political activists are busy investing in proptech - or distracted by ideological crusades, like their left-wing counterparts. The mainstream media has only recently woken up to this.

The US is going to have to decide if it still wants to encourage individual home ownership as a path to financial security and social stability. If yes, it will need to disincentivize the commodification of houses. For example, a 70% income tax surcharge, a 5X property tax surcharge, and a 10% real estate transfer tax applied to entities that own, directly or through related entitities, more than, let's say, 50 houses. That would not touch individual homeowners or small landlords, but would clip the wings of the institutional house fleet buyers and traders.