A New Housing Marketplace That’s Keeping Homes Unaffordable
Homebuilding giant Lennar has a large stockpile of houses it can’t sell at current asking prices. Instead of lowering home prices for the public, the company has launched an e-marketplace catering to wealthy investors and corporate landlords.

Lennar’s new housing marketplace comes at a time when stockpiles of newly built homes have reached a fifteen-year high, with the number of homes for sale far surpassing the number of buyers. (Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Lennar, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder, has built more homes than it’s capable of selling at the current asking prices. But instead of lowering home prices for the public, the company has launched an online marketplace available exclusively to deep-pocketed investors and corporate landlords to offload its housing stockpile.
The new platform offers search tools and sweetheart deals targeting C-suite customers like Blackstone and Greystar, the largest corporate landlords in the country, as well as smaller landlords. Real estate experts say Lennar is doing this to juice home sales and steer business toward its lucrative in-house mortgage lender — at the expense of consumers, who are being boxed out of homeownership and forced to pay ever-higher home and rental costs.
These all-in-one suites of services have become common as increasingly popular online real estate behemoths like Zillow and Rocket Mortgage have vertically integrated the homebuying process. These companies’ online platforms advertise listings and then funnel buyers toward their in-house mortgage lenders to maximize profits — a type of “kickback scheme” that generates profits at the homebuyers’ expense, according to experts and federal regulators.