No Evidence of BlackRock Buying Up Entire Neighborhoods
The Claim
Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, is purchasing every family home at 20-50% above market rates in order to implement a new form of Feudalism.
News posted on
Emerging story
A viral Twitter thread made claims regarding the asset management company BlackRock. The opening tweet in the thread stated that Blackrock was purchasing every single-family house that it could locate for significantly above asking prices. In fact, the figure given in was 20-50% over the asking price. This opening tweet in the thread linked to a Wall Street Journal article as evidence to support the claim.
Follow-up tweets made further claims about BlackRock and other powerful companies buying up entire neighborhoods. The thread claimed that these actions were a part of The Great Reset, an attempt to consolidate wealth to the top of society and establish a new form of Feudalism.
This thread went viral, with the initial tweet in the thread alone gaining over 17,300 likes and 13,000 retweets within 24 hours. A number of similar tweets have repeated the claim.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation concludes that the viral Twitter thread contains significant amounts of misleading and exaggerated information. The claim that BlackRock is buying every single-family home it can locate for up to 50% above the asking price is false. The Wall Street Journal article that the initial tweet links to does not state this. It states that pension funds and similar finance companies are aggressively buying homes, but not to the extent that the tweet states. Instead, the article cites an instance of a property investing platform, Fundrise LLC, purchasing a community of homes for $32 million, which represented a 50% profit margin for the company that sold the community of homes. The article mentions BlackRock once briefly, listing it among several companies that are buying houses.
The second link on the thread goes to the BlackRock website itself. This web page discusses how BlackRock is investing in renewable energy. It does not concern the purchase of homes. The original poster listed two other articles before many tweets that claim that BlackRock is attempting to create a feudal great reset. The first article does concern BlackRock and discusses a “great reset.” But the great reset it refers to is about companies resetting to sustainable energy investments. The second article only briefly mentions BlackRock and concerns investment advice. It does not concern the creation of a feudal great reset.
Our analysis was able to identify plenty of evidence of wealthy money management companies, BlackRock included, who are aggressively moving into real estate investments. However, we could not identify a reliable source that repeated the Twitter thread’s claims that BlackRock and other money managers were buying every home they could locate for 20%-50% above market value in an attempt to create a societal feudal reset.
