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It started in 2020 with a question. How much of Hampton Roads’ apartments are owned by real estate investors? After half a decade of combing through housing data and SEC records, sales archives, LEIs and LLCs, we can finally say: at least 45%
It started in 2020 with a question. How much of Hampton Roads’ apartments are owned by real estate investors? After half a decade of combing through housing data and SEC records, sales archives, LEIs and LLCs, we can finally say: at least 45%.
Today, we’re proud to launch a new housing atlas for the region. Our landlord atlas is an interactive map showing who owns what in Hampton Roads. Fully searchable and free, we’ve compiled information on the true ownership of over 500 buildings, representing over 80,000 apartments, to shine a light on the network of investor landlords in our communities.
Hampton Roads Landlord Atlas
With the launch of the landlord atlas, CityWork is kicking off a series that looks at the impact of real estate investment firms on housing in the region. We’ll be offering a closer analysis in coming reports. For now, here are the basics.At least 62,350 apartments are owned by investors. According to Newmark, there are 138,509 multifamily units in Hampton Roads (excl. Williamsburg). That translates to at least 45% of apartments being owned by investors.
The landlord atlas is an interactive map of apartments in Hampton Roads that provides data on building ownership. Most property records only list the registered owner of a building. Our database includes information on the apartment’s ultimate beneficial owner, as well as whether ultimate owner is a real estate investment firm, and how many evictions the landlord has filed since 2018.
We will have more to report as we synthesize this data.For some, the threat that real estate investors pose to affordable housing is overblown. “The boogeyman isn't who you want it to be,” Jerusalem Demsas writes. A handful of evictions here, a rent hike there—bad actors, sure, but at best, unscrupulous investors are an anomaly in an otherwise ordered housing market. At worst, they pose a frivolous distraction from the hard work of housing economics.What I contend is that investment firms can no longer be considered anomalies in the housing market. They are the housing market. What I hope this atlas helps us understand is that these actors are not ‘ghosts inside the machine’. They are the machine.
When a landlord buys a building, they often use an LLC, or Limited Liability Corporation, to hide their identity. These LLCs, though legal, act as shell corporations adding multiple layers between properties and their ultimate owners. The effect of this is an obfuscated and fractured network of ownership that makes it nearly impossible to know who owns what. This matters for anyone concerned about affordable housing in our region.For example, take three different apartments: Waterford Apartments in Virginia Beach, Towne Point Landing in Portsmouth, and Riverlands Apartments in Newport News. On paper, each building is owned by a different company. Blx Waterford Owner, LLC; Towne Pointe Owner, LLC; and Blx Riverlands Owner LLC.In reality, each building is owned by one company: Blackfin Real Estate Investors. In fact, Blackfin owns more than 2,000 units in Hampton Roads.But on paper, you’d never know.
Our work relies exclusively on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) methods. Everything in the atlas is publicly available information. More on our methodology, including how we determined what entities are investors, can be found below. Some owners are easy to track down. Others take more time, like Villa Terrace in Norfolk. On paper, the building is owned by Trc Villa Terrace, Llc whose address is registered in Idaho. We had to dig through SEC records to connect the ultimate owners to Table Rock Capital, a real estate investment firm in California. Still other information was pieced together from LinkedIn posts, sales associates bragging about closing a deal, or property transaction records from years ago.We don’t know every owner. For some buildings, we searched but could not reliably determine ownership. Buildings whose ownership we could not determine or substantiate are marked in grey on the map.
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