by Brian Hamilton, opinion contributor – 01/10/26 2:00 PM ET
President Trump this week took to social media to signal a shift in the national conversation about housing, announcing plans to ban big investors from buying single-family homes.
It’s about time.
At the peak of the pandemic, almost 5 percent of homes were being purchased by institutional buyers. In cities like Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa and Charlotte, institutional investors own more than 15 percent of rental homes.
Imagine that — the average American family competing in the housing market against multibillion-dollar private equity firms and tech-enabled real estate platforms. It isn’t exactly a fair fight; it’s a David versus Goliath match where Goliath has better algorithms and deeper pockets. I have wondered over the past several years how we have seen almost a fivefold increase in interest rates and a global pandemic without an adverse downward effect on real estate prices or even the economy.
Rather, real estate prices have actually increased by almost 55 percent over the past five years. How is this possible? Where are the economic slumps that make things more affordable for all of us? Many Americans are locked out of homeownership as a result of high prices.
The economy is actually very tenuously balanced where small changes in things like inflation and interest rates typically toggle massive effects in economic indicators like job creation and real gross domestic product. Despite the economy of the world being largely closed for more than a year during the COVID pandemic, these economic indicators have held up fairly well.
As a product of the early 1970s, I have followed the economy as both a matter of hobby and the practical expedient of being an entrepreneur. I lived through the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president and high inflation and interest rates stalled the economy.
But now suppose you have a small group of people who have enough cash to stave off these effects and wait as they keep buying. Their plan is actually simple, and it is not new. John D. Rockefeller did the same thing in the oil business. Joseph Kennedy and others did it in the 1920s in equities.
They buy up supply and basically corner the market — or at least control too much of the market. Then they drive prices higher or, alternatively, make all of us their renters — non-owners. It is the lazy and slothful approach to capitalism. They don’t compete and win by better performance and better products — they win by gaining unfair advantage. They win by essentially cheating.
I remember watching Milton Friedman, a leading apostle of capitalism, and being impressed by his logic and reasoning about the approximate perfectionism of capitalism. Now, as someone who has been around for a while and has been on the real battlefront as an entrepreneur, I realize he missed one crucial thing: The efforts of a very few well-organized, greedy people can compromise the free enterprise system generally and the dreams and possibilities of the middle class specifically. Greed is not good. Greed is bad. It is a perverted and adulterated extension of something good — the “free” market.
Greed is like any bad thing — it does not exist on its own but grows out of something good. It accumulates wealth and power for the few and eventually kills off the free market system that allows it to operate. Adam Smith himself understood this, and that capitalism required morality to effectively endure. The basement capitalists of today are the people who operate outside of the light of day. They don’t want to compete. They don’t care about people. They want to control.
What does this mean? The same thing it meant 100 years ago. Teddy Roosevelt and his successor, William Taft, understood the nature of these people — they will always gravitate toward greed and making money to the detriment of the many. They must be defeated through government intervention that levels the playing field — before it is too late. The level of business ownership has dropped precipitously. Now, these people are going after our homes. They must be thwarted to preserve and defend the American Dream.
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Brian Hamilton is the founder of Sageworks (now Abrigo), one of the world’s very first fintech companies, which has helped thousands of banks and millions of business owners. He is also the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, an international program that helps justice-involved people start low-capital businesses, as well as the star of ABC’s “Free Enterprise” TV show.
