By Floyd Norris | The New York Times
Wall Street is driving up home prices again, but this time it is not by granting mortgages to customers who cannot afford houses. Instead, institutional investors have been buying up relatively inexpensive homes, particularly in areas hard hit by foreclosures during and after the Great Recession.
In the Atlanta area, prices of the least expensive homes have more than doubled since March 2012, when home prices nationwide hit bottom, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller indexes of home prices.
That is by far the best performance by relatively inexpensive homes in any of the 16 markets for which the S.&P./Case-Shiller indexes break out performance by thirds of the market.
