@Account Closed My answer to your first question is that I know of no legal reason that prevents private equity funds from going after houses everywhere, but there are some economic barriers. Blackrock and other similar fund managers are investing money on behalf of others (typically institutions like state employees retirement plans and university endowments, etc.), and they are seeking the best yield they can find. These funds seek to deploy capital in the most efficient way possible because it improves yield. For this reason, they prefer to purchase large commercial properties. As an example, a 300 unit apartment complex is more cost effective to manage than 300 rental houses scattered across any given area. I suppose it's possible that technology improvements could improve efficiency of disparate asset management; however, there will still be inefficiency imbedded in scattered unit ownership because each unit will have a unique cost structure.
With respect to your prior experience with Citivest, I am not familiar with that firm, so I cannot comment on its business plan; however, I was managing a large portfolio of REO for a large regional bank on the east coast during the Great Recession. At that time, the country was flooded with housing units and completed lots (unlike today), and when the music stopped, there were few individual buyers. That created a buying opportunity for investment firms, who purchased partially completed developments for pennies on the dollar. They finished partially completed homes and built new homes on completed lots for the purpose of renting them out. Most of the cases I saw involved institutions buying whole neighborhoods, not scattered individual houses, so the concept was similar to my original post.
As far as printing money goes, the fear is that all of the stimulus in the economy has nowhere to go (i.e. there is no increase in production to offset the new money supply), and the result will be asset price inflation. I'm not an economist, but I believe there is some truth to this argument. World governments have been handing out stimulus for years, but the world hasn't seen large increases in productivity or new products. As a result, the money gets spent and ends up aggregated in the hands of large corporate interests or goes into savings.
One final point to share, and this is only my opinion, so take it for what it's worth. Many of the articles paint Blackrock and other similar firms as evil for buying homes and robbing individuals of the opportunity for wealth creation, but if private equity funds are buying and renting homes, they are engaging in similar behavior to many individual landlords, just at larger scale. Who among us would not build the biggest, most profitable portfolio of rental houses if we could? Does that make us bad people? I would also point out that private equity funds are investing on behalf of others. Although not exclusively the case, the investors in private equity funds typically consist of public and private pensions, so the beneficiaries of these investments are teachers, police, firefighters, etc.
