Three Years Ago, It Didn’t Exist Here. Today, An Ohio Company Is One of Omaha’s Biggest

This story originally ran in the Flatwater Free Press.

Kerry and Vicky Blacketer have lived in their North Omaha home for nearly 16 years. Their children graduated high school while living here. Their grandchildren play house in the living room.

When the drains kept backing up, Kerry Blacketer – a bricklayer by trade – replaced the pipes in the basement himself. When the front porch sagged, he put in new brick pillars, hammered in some new floorboards and gave it a fresh coat of paint.

The Blacketers did these repairs with their own money.  

Now they raise chickens in the backyard. 

“So, it’s home,” Kerry Blacketer said. “It’s home.”

Which is why he was shocked when, a few months ago, he tore open a piece of mail addressed to him – an envelope with no return address, he says. 

It was the first piece of U.S. mail he had ever received from his new landlord.

Inside was an eviction notice. 

The Blacketers knew their longtime local landlord had sold this house just southwest of Miller Park. They didn’t know that their rental home had been bought by an Ohio-based private company that’s buying up lower-priced homes at an eye-widening rate across the Great Plains, Midwest, the South – and now in Omaha.

Today, Vinebrook Homes, a company with $2.4 billion in assets that didn’t own a single home in Omaha 30 months ago, has become one of the largest landlords in the city. 

The flurry of purchases is helping to superheat the housing market in poor neighborhoods. It’s raising rents in North Omaha. And it’s concerning experts, tenants, local landlords and real estate agents who worry that giant out-of-state real estate investment groups like Vinebrook are making it harder for Omahans to buy their own homes. 

The Flatwater Free Press and KETV have spent two months looking into the local impact of Vinebrook, which is buying Omaha houses under the names “VB One” and “VB Two.”

From January 2020 through September 2021, Vinebrook bought more Douglas County single family homes than anyone else, according to data from the Douglas County Registrar and Assessor of Deeds. 

All told, Vinebrook Homes has bought up some 250 houses in the metro area since Oct. 2019, a company spokesman said.

It operates the homes as rentals, often booting longtime tenants and raising rents in the process, say local landlords and tenants. 

As of May 4, VB One had the third-most units listed on the City of Omaha landlord registry. 

Roughly two-thirds of the Douglas County homes Vinebrook owns are in North Omaha – the historically redlined area which, for generations, contained the only neighborhoods where Black Omahans were allowed to buy a house.

The number of home sales has recently exploded in North Omaha, jumping by 80% between 2020 and 2021.

“They’re just dominating the housing market in North Omaha, which isn’t a good thing,” said Manne Cook, a former City of Omaha urban planner who’s now the project lead at Spark CDI, a neighborhood revitalization nonprofit working on housing-related projects in North Omaha. “They’re displacing communities. They’re displacing people. What is the opportunity for people to buy those homes now? Will there be as many opportunities going forward?”

“A really attractive business model”

A similar phenomenon is playing out across the country. Giant private-equity backed firms now own vast swaths of real estate border to border. They own more than a million apartment units. They own entire suburban housing developments in boomtowns like Atlanta, Houston and Miami. They own the land upon which trailer parks sit.

Corporate investors bought nearly one of every five homes – the two- and three-bedroom structures long seen as the passage to the American Dream – sold in the United States during the fourth quarter of 2021.

Vinebrook is a rapidly growing player in this market, quickly buying up homes in 23 markets including Kansas City, St. Louis and now Omaha. 

At the end of 2020, the company owned 9,282 rental properties. By this March, it had more than doubled its portfolio to 21,144 single-family rental homes, according to its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

“We invest in cities like Omaha where there is growing demand for (single-family rental) homes,” said Dana Sprong, co-founder and managing partner of Vinebrook Homes, in an email sent to the Flatwater Free Press. 

He noted that Vinebrook purchases represent only a tiny fraction of Omaha’s overall housing supply, which is true – “VB One” owns roughly 1% of parcels on Omaha’s rental registry. 

The company’s business model caters to people who want or need to rent, Sprong argues.

“Our presence is a response to the condition of the housing market and the fact that demand for renting homes is increasingly compelling for changing consumer tastes and goals,” he said.

Business is good for Vinebrook and companies like it, said John Johnson, a Marquette University professor who studies the changing housing market. 

The expert watched as Vinebrook burst onto the scene in Milwaukee. The company identifies cities where the rent-to-own value ratio is skewed, making it lucrative to buy up many homes and rent them out, he said. 

“The profit margins can just be wild,” Johnson said. “You can see why this is a really attractive business model for people who have figured it out.”

In Milwaukee, as in Omaha, Vinebrook focused on the city’s poorest neighborhoods, homes often occupied by families of color. They evict Milwaukee residents at higher rates than local landlords, he said. Vinebrook now owns massive amounts of real estate in that city, while having almost no local employees and virtually no civic presence in Milwaukee. 

“It is literally removing money from the city’s economy, often money that’s coming out of the pockets of some of the poorest citizens of that town,” Johnson said. 

With no fanfare, Vinebrook bought its first Omaha home just before Halloween 2019. It hasn’t stopped buying since. The flurry of purchases hasn’t always been a good thing for Omaha, say people who sold homes to Vinebrook, rent from them and compete with them for lower-income housing.

North Omaha impacted

Angel Starks and her real estate agent colleagues began to notice a sharp increase in out-of-state buyers. They took note of their new tactics.

These buyers pay in cash. They waive standard inspections. They make offers over the list price. 

That’s the aggressive approach that Vinebrook takes as well – an approach outlined by one of Vinebrook’s local contractors, longtime Omaha-area real estate broker Bruce Powell, in an email sent to real estate agents early this year. 

The email was forwarded to the Flatwater Free Press by an industry insider, not Starks.

In the email, Powell said Vinebrook had bought “over 16 million dollars’ worth of property” in the Omaha metro in the past year. “We want to keep that going this year,” he wrote. 

“We can buy them 1 at a time or if you have an investor that has 5000, we can do that also… Our offers are cash, quick closings. Once we do our walk through there (is) no formal inspection, termite inspections or appraisal.” 

Vinebrook has amassed $55 million in cash, according to its most recent filing. It uses that money as a hammer, making cash offers that most Omahans – people who must take out a loan to afford a house – can’t beat.  

“That puts first-time home buyers at a disadvantage,” said Amanda Brewer, CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. “They can’t compete with out-of-state investors who have cash offers.”

A cash sale over the list price often increases the home values on the block and neighborhood, said Starks, a real estate agent who sells homes all over the metro, including in North Omaha.

That’s good if you are selling a home. It’s not necessarily good if you are a North Omaha homeowner. Property valuations in the area are now the most undervalued in the county. Valuations – and the resulting tax bill – will likely soon increase.

And it’s very bad if you are an Omaha resident hoping to buy an affordable home in the northeast part of the…