See 9 NJ towns where corporations are buying up homes at an astonishing rate

Stephen Stirling and Michael L. Diamond, Asbury Park Press
·1 min read
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Editor's note: This story is part of a larger investigation on corporate housing and LLCs in New Jersey. Subscribers can read the full investigation here.

Corporate home ownership is exploding across New Jersey, accounting for more than 1 in 3 home purchases in some parts of the state.

Corporate home buyers carry several advantages most individuals do not, such as the ability to offer attractive all-cash offers and a willingness to waive inspections or appraisals. Its helped drain housing inventory to historic lows recently, and makes it difficult for first-time homebuyers to compete.

Read the full investigation:A corporate home buying boom is pricing you out of NJ

Consider:

  • The number of limited liability companies, or LLCs, that own homes in New Jersey has grown from around 12,000 in 2012 to more than 72,000 in 2021, a 500 percent increase.

  • At least one in four home sales in 22 New Jersey communities went to an LLC since 2017.

  • LLCs have captured nearly $8 billion in single- to four-family houses since 2017 alone.

More:How many homes in your NJ town are being sold to investors? Search our database

Some communities have been affected far more than others. Below are a collection of interactive visualizations showing some of the communities where LLC buying is most prevalent. Use the slider in the center of the image to toggle between the locations of LLC-owned homes in 2012 and 2021.

Asbury Park

Trenton

Newark

Camden

Willingboro

Woodlynne

Keansburg

Paterson

South Toms River

Sourcing and Methodology

This story is part of a larger investigation. Subscribers can read the full story here, which has considerably more information about what we found and what it could mean.

To conduct its analysis, the Asbury Park Press utilized data from the New Jersey Department of Treasury’s MOD-IV property tax records as well as its records of home sales in New Jersey from 2012 to 2022.

LLCs were extracted from both databases by analyzing ownership data, and the subsequent datasets were cleaned both manually and programmatically using software like OpenRefine. Duplicate entries were removed from both datasets. The Press analyzed residential class “2”, which specifically relates to single- to four-family housing. Nominal sales and real estate owned properties were identified and removed wherever possible.

Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter who has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at mdiamond@gannettnj.com.

Stephen Stirling is the investigative data editor at the Asbury Park Press. He can be reached at sstirlin

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: 9 NJ towns where homes are being bought up by corporations