The new housing bubble -- Wall St buying foreclosures, renting them out,

[KurtNYC]

and bundling them as investments. Adventures in neo-feudalism, with a safety net provided by the taxpayers...

Traditionally, buying, fixing and renting out single-family homes has been a mom ‘n’ pop affair. No longer. Bloemker is a Wall Street veteran who, until 2011, managed a $60 billion fixed-income portfolio at Boston-based Putnam Investments. He left to start his own firm, Five Ten Capital, with the aim of becoming a landlord on an industrial scale and used his Rolodex to secure $100 million in financing from Deutsche Bank .

He’s got lots of company. Billionaires, private equity firms and hedge funds have been swooping into the hardest-hit markets across the country and snapping up single-family homes by the tens of thousands. They’re plucking distressed properties out of the foreclosure pipeline with the aim of playing the housing recovery in the most direct means possible–as landlords.

Now Wall Street’s invasion of the cul-de-sac is about to enter a second phase as the money men offer income-starved retail investors new securities–REITs and bonds–backed by single-family rental homes. It’s too soon to say whether all this activity will produce a permanent and attractive new asset class or another bubble and bust, but billionaire real estate investor Sam Zell, for one, is skeptical. “An individual investor can buy 25 houses and monitor them,” he said recently. “I don’t know how anybody can monitor thousands of houses. I just don’t think that the logistics of that produce real positives.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2013/06/04/wall-street-buying-leads-to-housing-boom-is-a-new-bubble-on-the-way/

and the list of cities includes those hit hardest by the 2006/2007 bubble:

- Phoenix
- Las vegas
- Southern Cal
- Orlando
- Miami