I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?
Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that’s been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There’s no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you’ll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.
So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you’re going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.