Page 8 - Ryan Dezember News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

What’s really driving home prices today are massive, multibillion-dollar funds buying up all available housing.

Steve Fennessy: This is Georgia Today, I'm Steve Fennessy. Like millions of other Americans, you've probably spent a lot of time at home during the pandemic and chances are good you've also done a little home improvement over the last year. The remodeling market and housing sales are booming, and all this demand has sent the price of lumber and other wood products to all-time highs, which should be good news for tree growers across the South, right? Wrong. Georgia tree grower Wanda Barrs: The landowner, us, we haven't benefited from the increase in the price of lumber. Steve Fennessy: So who...

Provided by Dow Jones By Ryan Dezember, Joe Wallace and Andrew Barnett Prices for the building blocks of the economy have surged over the past year. Oil, copper, corn and gasoline futures all cost about twice what they did a year ago, when much of the world was locked down to fight the spread of the deadly coronavirus. Lumber has more than tripled. A lot of investors would probably see this chart and say it screams inflation. Soaring commodity prices have stoked fierce debate on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. over inflation and whether the fiscal and ...

Having trouble buying a home in Texas right now? The flurry of business relocations to the state are not the only reasons the real estate market is tighter. Some of the blame for this hot market can be traced to investment groups, according to Ryan Dezember, who wrote about this latest trend in the Wall Street Journal. The pandemic has lured more firms away from commercial real estate to residential. With so many office towers sitting empty right now as more people work from home, investment groups are swooping down and scooping up entire subdivisions to turn into rental properties.

Provided by Dow Jones By Ryan Dezember | Photographs by Jeff Lautenberger for The Wall Street Journal A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market. D.R. Horton Inc. built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who's Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December...