A Home subcommittee that investigated eviction practices by giant landlords through the pandemic issued a scathing report that mentioned 4 companies had engaged in “abusive” techniques to try to push renters out of their houses regardless of a federal moratorium.
The report was released Thursday, after a yearlong investigation and a listening to by the committee that appeared into the enterprise practices of so-called company landlords that led to eviction filings towards tens of hundreds of renters through the Covid-19 pandemic.
The committee centered primarily on 4 companies, together with Invitation Houses, a rental agency for single-family houses, and Siegel Group, a weekly rental agency. Its report mentioned the 4 had accounted for the submitting of almost 15,000 eviction circumstances from March 2020 to July 2021. It’s unclear what number of renters had been compelled out of their houses.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton College mentioned that within the markets it tracked, all landlords had filed 495,216 eviction actions through the interval the subcommittee examined.
“Whereas the abusive eviction practices documented on this report can be condemnable beneath any circumstances, they’re unconscionable throughout a once-in-a-century financial and public well being disaster,” mentioned Consultant James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who headed the subcommittee, in a press release.
The report discovered that Invitation Houses had “misleadingly downplayed” the impact of its pandemic eviction practices to Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage finance agency that supplied $1 billion in financing to Invitation Houses in 2017. Invitation Houses is likely one of the nation’s largest single-family rental companies, working greater than 83,000 properties.
Siegel Group, which operates beneath the title Siegel Suites, was singled out as “uniquely egregious.” The report mentioned the agency, which operates about 12,000 residences in eight states, had “engaged in misleading and probably illegal practices to stop tenants from understanding their safety from eviction” beneath the moratorium. The committee additionally discovered that Siegel had used harassment techniques to push tenants out with out submitting an eviction motion.
Mr. Clyburn wrote federal businesses about Invitation Houses and Siegel Group, asking them to evaluate the businesses’ actions.
A consultant for Invitation Houses mentioned the committee had discovered nothing illegal concerning the firm’s actions.
“In a time when the main focus ought to be on including much-needed provide to the nation’s housing market, it’s disappointing that the committee selected as an alternative to pursue a faultfinding mission,” mentioned Kristi DesJarlais, a spokeswoman.
Siegel, in a press release, mentioned it was shocked by the report, including that it “has always been dedicated to abiding by the letter and the spirit of the regulation.”
The committee additionally appeared into the eviction practices of Pretium Companions, one other giant single-family rental house operator, and Ventron Administration, which operates 8,000 residences in 26 states. Pretium mentioned in a press release that it had complied with the federal moratorium and that no resident coated by it “has ever been evicted from our houses for nonpayment of lease.”
Ventron couldn’t instantly be reached for remark.
Eviction moratoriums had been broadly credited with preserving hundreds of thousands of individuals from dropping their houses through the pandemic. However they typically didn’t stop landlords from initiating eviction actions through the pandemic, a observe that gave some landlords the power to shortly transfer to drive out tenants as soon as the federal moratorium ended final fall.
The filings created one other downside for renters as a result of they typically left a everlasting mark on a courtroom docket that may very well be used towards them sooner or later. Typically known as the “Scarlet E,” the mere submitting of an eviction motion towards an individual can typically be utilized by landlords as a cause for refusing to lease to them, even when the motion was dismissed.
Some states have sought to deal with that downside by sealing eviction actions filed through the pandemic.
