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Her house with vinyl siding had never attracted so many people. The mail would bring more postcard offers: Sell now! Will purchase as is. Everyone in the neighborhood was getting them.

The president of the Potters Glen Homeowners Association thought it was not right. More than 20 homeowners in her Charlotte neighborhood sold out to investors and their houses were quickly converted to rentals.

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Hamilton said that they were being bombarded.

Like hundreds of communities across the United States, Hamilton's neighborhood had become the target of large companies amassing empires of suburban homes for rent. Since the Great Recession, when millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, these companies have been expanding their portfolios of tens of thousands of single-family houses, a disproportionate number of them located in majority-Black neighborhoods like Potters Glen.

The rise of investor purchases has spawned complaints that the companies, flush with Wall Street money, are pricing out first-time home buyers and renting to tenants who have not been properly screened. In Potters Glen, one house owned by Invitation Homes, a $24 billion company created by a Wall Street firm, drew several reports of illegal drugs and gunfire.

Facing the influx, Hamilton asked if we could stop them.

The answer appears to be yes.

The Potters Glen board used the same legal authority that allows homeowners associations to punish people who fail to cut their grass, which made it difficult for investors to buy a home.

Property records show the pace of investor purchases has dropped since the board adopted the rule.

Hamilton, a retired executive assistant from Ohio, said they didn't want to become a renter's paradise.

The advocates for rental home companies argue that the restrictions make housing less affordable as neighborhoods in several states have moved to adopt similar rules. They have asked the state legislatures of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina to protect them from real estate restrictions that can be used to keep out minorities.

David Howard, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, said that preventing single-family rental home companies from purchasing homes in a community does nothing but reduce the availability of affordable rental housing.

Invitation Homes, one of several big firms that own houses in Potters Glen, called the rental restrictions "prejudicial, discriminatory, uninformed, and misaligned with the concept of fair housing."

Invitation Homes said it used a third-party screening company to vet the adult tenants of the house in Potters Glen where neighbors had reported gunfire, and that it eventually asked them to leave.

Hamilton argued that the board has the right to encourage homeowners to live in the community.

She said that there are some very good renters in the area, but that they wanted to make sure they kept a place for people who own their homes.

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Companies have begun to take over entire blocks as investors target the American suburbs. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, last year investors bought nearly 1 in 7 homes sold in the nation's top metropolitan areas, the most in two decades of record-keeping.

According to The Post, investors have purchased a disproportionate number of homes in neighborhoods where a majority of residents are Black. 30% of home sales in majority Black neighborhoods across the nation were to investors last year, compared with 12% in other Zip codes, according to an analysis by The Post.

According to an analysis by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Urban Institute, landlords backed by Wall Street own more than 4% of single family homes in Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County. Ely Portillo of the institute said that most of the houses are in the starter home price range.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, most of the purchases were made by out-of-state companies such as Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes.

Many homeowners associations have begun to fight back against corporate landlords.

At the Reserve at Back Creek, a subdivision of 39 houses near UNC-Charlotte, neighbors adopted a rule requiring an owner to live in a house for a year before renting it out. Only 18% of houses can be rented at any one time.

"Our main concern was with the faceless investment groups who were buying the homes more than just the renters." said Justin Kerner, 41, a former association board member.

A shooting last year that damaged several properties prompted the Avalon at Mallard Creek neighborhood to impose a one-year waiting period on rentals and cap them at 40% of units. The homeowners association board can reject a rental agreement based on investigative background reports.

Six homes had bullet holes, according to the homeowners association treasurer. Miller said that the shooting made her fearful and angry that the association had to pay for the repairs.

The gate was broken. There was a lot of traffic coming in and there was a gunfight.

Some investors have sold their properties since the new rules took effect. Property values have risen and monthly neighborhood clean ups have been organized by the homeowners association.

She said it was working.

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It is not always easy to restrict rentals. Hunter said homeowners associations come to him about once a week. Potters Glen is worried about long-term corporate leases, while others want to curtail short-term rentals.

In North Carolina, at least 67% of homeowners in a community must approve new rules, and reaching that threshold can be a challenge.

There can be a lot of apathy in neighborhoods. He said that a lot of people don't bother to return the ballots.

The going in Potters Glen was slow. When Hamilton moved to Ohio in 2015, the homeowners association board seemed desperate. She became board president a year later.

She was a natural choice. Hamilton was the executive assistant to the city manager of Middletown, Ohio.

I'm a person who is methodical. She said she believed in order.

She shook her head when she walked out her front door one February afternoon.

She said that it irritates her every time she walks outside. unkempt.

Rental restrictions were proposed during an all-day board meeting. Hamilton asked the board members how to improve the neighborhood. They considered, among other things, whether to prohibit chain-link fences, whether sex offenders and other felons should be allowed in, and whether residents should be allowed to keep pit bulls and Rottweilers.

The main topic was renters. The Potters Glen houses were built in the early 2000s and are close to the UNC-Charlotte campus. The investors were in the neighborhood.

The companies that wanted to buy in all of a sudden were not from Charlotte, according to the board member who worked with Hamilton to pass the rules. We wondered what they wanted with us.

The board had a lawyer draft the rental restrictions and put them up for a vote. They were not very popular.

People didn't like the idea at first. The owners were reassured that the rental restrictions would not apply to them at the time.

More than three-fourths of the community voted for the rental restrictions after three community meetings.

Hamilton said that people realized that they couldn't just become a community of renters. We had too much to lose.

The problem with some rental homes continued. In the spring of 2020, Hamilton wrote a letter to the company's CEO demanding more intensive screening after a number of police visits to the property.

Would you like to live next to a group of people who are lawless? The police department has been called out to this home several times.

Invitation Homes did not kick the renters out immediately. The company said in a statement that the lease would not be renewed when it expired a few months after the May 2020 incident.

Police visited the block twice before the lease expired, once after a drive-by shooting at the house, according to police reports. The company asked the tenants to leave after the incident.

The company said that when the shooting occurred, they asked the resident to leave.

The pace of investor purchases has slowed because of the rental restrictions. Investment groups bought about 12 homes in the three years before the rental limits. According to property records, the pace has slowed to four per year since then.

Property records show that companies affiliated with some of the nation's big rental firms have continued to purchase homes at Potters Glen. The rental limits went into effect a year after Invitation Homes bought one. The company said that the neighborhood restriction was not noted in the system.

Also, bought one. In a statement, the company said it aims to work with homeowners associations and that it does not appear that the waiting period was communicated in the documentation for the purchase of this home.

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Spurning investors can come with a cost.

She put her home up for sale after finishing her term as board president. She and her husband moved to Charlotte to help her daughter raise her children. She needed to go back to Ohio to be with her family.

Hamilton added a line to the real estate listing for her home that said investors would not be considered.

The real estate agent was bombarded with calls. According to her agent, the Hamiltons received seven offers of all-cash payment. They took the one with a personal letter.

The letter began with a thank you from a teacher working at a local school who had two kids. The 9-year-old already had a purple bedroom.

The teacher's offer was $13,000 less than the investors' highest offer. Hamilton said that she touched his heart.

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