Eviction filings and code complaints: What happened when a private equity firm became one city's big
Source: Washington Post
Eviction filings and code complaints: What happened when a private equity firm became one city’s biggest homeowner
By Todd C. Frankel and Dan Keating December 25 at 5:42 PM
She was late on rent and back in eviction court. Second time this year. Fourth time in the past two. Cassandra Brown, married mother of two, was fighting to stay in a house that her family had owned for years, until they lost it to the bank shortly after the 2008 financial meltdown.
Now, she and her family continued to live in the same house as renters, paying more each month in rent than they once did in mortgage. Brown didn’t want to uproot her children, even as the house passed from one investor to the next, finally landing with the $35 billion New York private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.
Cerberus has become in just three years the largest owner of single-family homes in this Mississippi River town, with nearly 1,800 houses rented out to thousands of residents.
It also uses unusually aggressive tactics to recover late rent. The property manager it owns and operates, FirstKey Homes, files for eviction at twice the rate of other rental home property managers in the Memphis area and threatens renters with removal at the highest rate among the area’s large management firms, going to court more than 400 times this year alone, according to a Washington Post analysis of county records and interviews.
Cerberus-owned homes in Memphis also racked up property code violations this year at a consistently higher rate than other single-family rentals in the same neighborhoods, equal to a new violation every day or two. The 190 total citations were usually minor, such as for unmown lawns, but they also have included major issues such as a burned-out house not far from Graceland that sat for nearly a year before the city recently condemned it. The frequency of code violations has caused frustration among local officials.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/eviction-filings-and-code-complaints-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-became-one-citys-biggest-homeowner/2018/12/25/995678d4-02f3-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html
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