It’s too simple to say that the influx of new landlords has been a bad thing for home buyers, said Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Zillow. When banks were hesitant to lend, cash buyers helped resuscitate comatose markets. Even now that investors are competing with would-be buyers, it’s not clear to Gudell that they’re taking precious housing stock off the market.

”We can all agree that there aren’t enough homes to buy, but if you look at rental rates, you can also say there aren’t enough homes to rent,” she said.

During the dark days of the Great Recession, it was fashionable to wonder whether the housing crisis would sour an entire generation on the idea of home ownership. That hasn’t quite come to pass, at least not according to a bevy of surveys reporting that the vast majority of millennials still aspire to home ownership.

At the same time, the share of U.S. households that rent is at its highest level since 1965, leading Redfin’s Kelman to wonder whether the growing class of new landlords has wrought permanent change on the country’s housing market.

”The interesting thing to me is that when investors were buying up property in 2011 and 2012, there was all this anxiety about what will happen when they sell,” Kelman said. “Now everyone is surprised to find out that they’re not flippers, but given where rents and mortgage rates are, it makes sense. We may have to acknowledge that there’s only one shoe, and it dropped in 2011.”

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