The former Hollywood Hills home of late legend Bill Withers is the latest property to be snatched up by investors to flip it and put it back on the market.
According to TMZ, the Hollywood Hills pad purchased by Withers for $714,000 in 1998 went to real estate property-tech app Belwood Investments for $3.7 million in an off-market sale. The company, a “real estate crowdfunding firm,” purchased Kanye West’s Malibu estate for $21 million nearly 24 hours before it got its hands on Withers’ former home.
Belwood Investments allows people to invest in fixing up homes before placing them back on the market.
Before his passing in 2020, Withers sold the home to an unnamed tech CEO in 2019, who kept his OG recording studio on the ground floor intact and in good use as it was reported that stars like Wiz Khalifa have recorded in the studio thanks to the CEO’s music producer roommate.
The Hollywood Hills home was sold in an off-market deal in June and is an example of the recent uptick of investors purchasing real estate predominantly owned by Black people, thus cutting Black families out of homeownership.
In a 2023 study led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, research shows that investors are most likely to push Black, middle-class homeowners out of their neighborhoods. According to the data, which observed 800 metropolitan Atlanta neighborhoods from 2007 to 2016, major investors purchased homes in majority-minority neighborhoods far from downtown and more likely to be in low-income areas.
Per the research, Black people as a whole lost out on more than $4 billion in home equity across the span of 10 years due to investors.
“That $4 billion refers to the home values that would have gone to individual homebuyers if these large institutional investment firms hadn’t purchased those properties,” said Brian An, assistant professor at the School of Public Policy. “This is a very conservative, lower estimate than what the actual effect probably is.”
Often undervalued due to minority populations, the homes purchased were still profitable and offered investors good market value.
However, this approach to investing in properties not only keeps Black people out of the homeowner conversation but also prevents them from getting a piece of the pie when it comes to investing in property and accumulating generational wealth.RELATED CONTENT: John Hope Bryant Says The 40-Year Mortgage Is In and The 30-Year Mortgage Is Out