New Rutgers-Newark Housing Report Finds Alarming Increase in Corporations Buying Newark Homes

Tom Wiedmann

4 May, 2022

NEWARK, NJ — During the past three years Newark resident Deborah Smith-Gregory has been bombarded with daily phone calls urging her to sell her home.

“It’s been calling at all times of the day and night - both cellphone and landline. They say, ‘Are you interested in selling your property? We’ve been looking at your home, and we can offer you cash,’” said Smith-Gregory, a resident of the South Ward for about 30 years. “It’s all day to the point that I don’t even answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number.”

The problem doesn’t end for Smith-Gregory after she hangs up. Outside her front door, she sees “We Buy Houses For Cash” signs posted throughout her ward in the city’s Weequahic neighborhood and flyers posted on residents’ lawn railings and mailboxes.

“The neighbors, we have been talking about it. We’re all getting the phone calls,” she said. “We block the phone call, but they find another algorithm to get through and call again.”

The issue Smith-Gregory and her neighbors face on a daily basis has become part of a larger trend Newark residents have experienced in recent years, which is a push from corporate buyers, backed by investors, to buy homes to rent out and pay investors through money from rent collection.

In fact, nearly half of Newark’s single-family homes (homes between one and four units) between 2017 and 2020 were sold to institutional buyers, according to a report released this week by the Newark-based Rutgers Law School Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity.

“In Newark, we’re seeing investor-buying at an even greater scale more than any other city we could find,” David Troutt, CLiME director and co-author of the report,“Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers," told TAPinto Newark.

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New Rutgers-Newark Housing Report Finds Alarming Increase in Corporations Buying Newark Homes