This is disgusting:
Four major corporate landlords filed thousands of evictions while federal moratorium orders were still standing, using aggressive tactics to force out tenants at the height of the pandemic, according to a new investigation by a House subcommittee.
Together the four companies — Ventron Management, the Siegel Group, Invitation Homes and Pretium Partners — filed nearly 15,000 evictions between March 15, 2020, and July 29, 2021, three times as many as previously known. Even as the companies moved to dislodge tenants who fell behind on rent after the economy cratered during lockdowns, they themselves suffered few financial setbacks, according to the report released Thursday from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Pretium expanded its rental portfolio, Invitation recorded record profits and boosted rents, and Ventron and Siegel each received more than $2 million in federal loans since forgiven by the Paycheck Protection Program. Still, all four companies allowed evictions to be filed, even going after tenants who were waiting for emergency rental assistance funds to hit their accounts.
“As countless Americans acted admirably to support their communities during the coronavirus crisis, the four landlord companies investigated by the Select Subcommittee evicted aggressively to pad their profits,” Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and the subcommittee chair, said in a statement. “While the abusive eviction practices documented in this report would be condemnable under any circumstances, they are unconscionable during a once-in-a-century economic and public health crisis.”
Some of the abuses outlined in the report may have violated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium, which carried penalties for landlords, or otherwise flouted state and federal policies, according to the report. The select subcommittee passed on some findings about Siegel and Invitation Homes to certain agencies for potential enforcement actions, including the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Fannie Mae.
In a quarterly earnings call on July 28, Dallas B. Tanner, the CEO of Invitation Homes, addressed the subcommittee’s report. “The report clearly states that we did not engage in practices that were unlawful,” he said. “We work hard to follow all the laws within our markets.” A statement from the company added that “we responded transparently and in good faith to the Subcommittee’s multiple requests over the past year. In a time when the focus should be on adding much-needed supply to the country’s housing market, it’s disappointing that the committee chose instead to pursue a fault-finding mission.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Pretium Partners said: “We have always complied with the CDC moratorium — no resident covered by a valid CDC declaration has ever been evicted from our homes for non-payment of rent. In fact, we had voluntarily extended the CDC moratorium for residents covered by valid CDC declarations beyond its expiration. Nothing in today’s report takes issue with either of these facts.”
The subcommittee’s year-long investigation yielded unprecedented findings on practices and policies by executives and managers from all four companies, which together hold properties across 28 states. Using data supplied by the firms, for example, the subcommittee discovered that they were responsible for a total of 14,744 eviction filings — almost triple the 5,433 filings tabulated by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project before the congressional investigation began. Two of the companies, Invitation and Siegel, did not maintain complete records on their eviction practices, meaning the total number could be even greater.
The investigation reveals a rare view of the chain of command that steered pandemic evictions, from corporate executives to regional directors and property managers. An email from an executive at Siegel, for example, advised a property manager and regional manager in San Antonio to harass a tenant by towing her car, replacing her air conditioning unit with a nonworking unit, knocking on her door “at least twice a night” and even calling child protective services on the tenant if any children were present. (The committee referred its findings to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.)
In other documents obtained by the subcommittee, a Siegel executive instructed subordinates to post and distribute misleading copies of a court judgment on the CDC order after 5 p.m. on a Friday, so apartment residents would have little recourse to verify the memo with court officials.
That executive followed up with other regional managers, noting that “properties have been using this order to bluff people out.” In an email to a regional manager and executive at Siegel, one property manager wrote to that he “love[d] getting to say that this means the eviction may happen sooner than expected and seeing the look on their faces,” adding a smiley face emoji.
The report also details several inquiries made by Fannie Mae into eviction practices at Invitation, the single-family landlord that was taken public by Blackstone Inc. in 2017. In March 2021, Invitation told a Fannie Mae representative that only 6% of the company’s eviction filings over the prior six months resulted in eviction. The company was only counting formal evictions, as some 27% of tenants who were subject to eviction filings over that six-month span either left or were evicted.
Over the full span of the federal eviction moratorium, 29% of Invitation Homes residents who received notices — thousands of tenants — were displaced.
The landlords were quick to file for evictions, even as federal authorities worked to pause them in order to distribute some $47 billion in emergency rent relief authorized by Congress. According to the House subcommittee report, more than 9 out of 10 evictions filed by Ventron were over just one month of late rent. Eviction actions taken by Ventron and Pretium followed lapses in payment of as little as $500. These actions continued even after tenants applied for federal relief.
Federal agencies warned that major national landlords who forced out tenants or deprived them of their rights under eviction orders risked running afoul of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act.
“Evicting tenants in violation of the CDC, state, or local moratoria, or evicting or threatening to evict them without apprising them of their legal rights under such moratoria, may violate prohibitions against deceptive and unfair practices,” reads a joint statement from the FTC and CFPB in March 2021.
Nothing less than evil.