Public policy in the latter half of the twentieth century actively promoted household homeownership in recognition of the numerous socioeconomic benefits that families stand to gain from owning a home. Yet the cascading effects of the 2008 financial downturn fundamentally disrupted this progress and ushered in a paradigm shift headlined by the increasing activity of large corporate actors in the single-family housing market space. The transfer of massive quantities of single-family homes to large corporate investors after the foreclosure crisis has come to symbolize a permanent restructuring of the single-family housing market with enormous implications for housing access, affordability and renter welfare. This has led to clarion calls to understand the behaviors of these corporate actors as a crucial step towards mitigating potential adverse impacts on families and households. This dissertation - structured as three separate but interlinked articles - aims to understand corporate behavior along three fronts. The first objective is to understand the property and neighborhood characteristics that serve as key determinants of corporate single-family housing ownership. In the second objective, the aim to identify property and neighborhood factors that elevate the risk of corporate capture when a single-family home goes on sale in the open market. In the last objective, the influence of corporate ownership of single-family rentals on residential mobility is explored. The study is conducted in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County in North Carolina and accomplished using a combination of econometric and explainable machine learning models. In the first objective, the results show that corporate ownership of single-family houses is not random but are guided by operational considerations aligned with cost efficiency, risk management, and long-term portfolio optimization while neighborhood patterns mirror entrenched socioeconomic segregation informally described as the ‘Crescent and Wedge’. The results from the second objective show that the market segment sought by corporate investors in Charlotte critically overlaps with the entry-level housing stock sought by first-time and lower- to middle-income homebuyers. This overlap intensifies competition between institutional investors and individual households. Finally, in contrast to prevailing public discourse, the results from the third objective indicate that corporate ownership exerts only a negligible direct effect on the likelihood of residential mobility once property, household, and neighborhood characteristics are considered. Collectively, the dissertation advances three central conclusions. First, corporate participation in the single-family housing market is highly selective and strategically structured, driven primarily by property-level considerations and nuanced neighborhood targeting. Second, vulnerability to corporate acquisition is concentrated within housing segments that overlap with the demand profiles of first-time and moderate-income homebuyers, intensifying household-corporate competition under tight supply conditions. Third, while corporate acquisition reshapes ownership patterns and market competition, its direct effect on residential mobility appears more limited than may be commonly assumed, suggesting that instability is rooted more deeply in systemic housing market dynamics than in ownership type alone.
